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DIVINE HERESY: WOMEN'S REVISIONS OF SACRED TEXTS
by
MANDOLIN R. BRASSAW
A DISSERTATION
Presented to the Department of English
and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
December 2008
11
University of Oregon Graduate School
Confirmation of Approval and Acceptance of Dissertation prepared by:
Mandolin Brassaw
Title:
"Divine Heresy: Women's Revisions of Sacred Texts"
This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of English by:
Shari Huhndorf, Chairperson, English
Karen Ford, Member, English
David Vazquez, Member, English
Daniel Falk, Outside Member, Religious Studies
and Richard Linton, Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies/Dean of the
Graduate School for the University of Oregon.
December 13,2008
Original approval signatures are on file with the Graduate School and the University of
Oregon Libraries.
© 2008 Mandolin R. Brassaw
111
in the Department of English
Mandolin Rose Brassaw
An Abstract of the Dissertation of
for the degree of
to be taken
IV
Doctor of Philosophy
December 2008
Title: DIVINE HERESY: WOMEN'S REVISIONS OF SACRED TEXTS
Approved: _
Shari Huhndorf
This dissertation argues that American women writers have revised sacred texts to
challenge patriarchy, racism, and colonialism and rewritten American history to reveal
how biblical scripture has been implicated in these processes. I focus on the literary
strategies of Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Lucille Clifton to rewrite sacred
texts and create myths for a new society. In different ways, these writers redefine
Christianity, often by countering the erasures of women in biblical scripture, recovering
suppressed texts such as those from the gnostic tradition, and creating new sacred texts.
Chapter I traces the history of feminist scriptural revision from the early feminist
movement to its resurgence in the late-twentieth century. In this period, a number of
authors rewrote religious scripture from a pre-Christian tradition; Elaine Pagels' The
Gnostic Gospels played a critical role in the attention given to scripture suppressed by
Christianity and the potential it holds for writers interested in recovering alternative
epistemologies. Chapter II focuses on Morrison's Beloved and Jazz, which are concerned
vwith the way biblical theology is proliferated through apocalyptic narrative strategies and
omniscient narration. This chapter investigates the shift Morrison makes between
biblical and gnostic concerns in the first two books of her trilogy. Chapter III analyzes
the final book in Morrison's trilogy, Paradise, and compares it to Silko's Gardens in the
Dunes. Here, Morrison relies on gnostic sources to scrutinize the effects of biblical
notions of utopia on literarature and its implications for social relations. Gardens uses
the same sources but puts them to different uses, subverting their authority in a rewriting
that supports Native survival through a program of cultural syncretism. Chapter IV
examines the poetry of Lucille Clifton, who, although initially revising Christianity
through her refiguring of the Lucifer character, rejects that tradition following the events
of9/11. Clifton's work in Mercy marks ajuncture in women's revisions of sacred texts
in its departure from Christianity and its introduction of a new sacred text and moral code
not predicated upon hierarchy. In conclusion, I consider how these writers extend
feminist and anti-racist traditions of scriptural revision explored in the introduction.
CURRICULUM VITAE
NAME OF AUTHOR: Mandolin R. Brassaw
GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED:
University of Oregon, Eugene
Willamette University, Salem, OR
DEGREES AWARDED:
Doctor of Philosophy, English, 2008, University of Oregon
Master of Arts, English, 2003, University of Oregon
Bachelor of Arts, Studio Art and English, 1999, Willamette University
AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST:
Twentieth and Twenty-first Century American Literature
Women's Literature and Ethnic American Literature
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
Adjunct Faculty in English, Washington State University, Vancouver, 2008
Adjunct Faculty in English, Chemeketa Community College, Salem, OR, 2008
Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Oregon, 2002-2008
GRANTS, AWARDS AND HONORS:
Jane Grant Dissertation Fellowship, "Divine Heresy: Women's Revisions of
Sacred Texts," University of Oregon 2006-2007
PUBLICAnONS:
Brassaw, Mandolin. "Sacred Spaces: Feminist Revisions in Paradise."
International Journal ofthe Humanities. 5.12. Melbourne, Australia:
Common Ground Publishing, 2008. 15-22.
VI
Vll
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to express sincere appreciation to Dr. Shari Huhndorffor her encouragement
and support in every stage of this project. This dissertation was funded in part by the Jane
Grant Dissertation Fellowship from the Center for the Study ofWomen in Society at the
University of Oregon.
V111
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. THE INDICTMENT SERVED ON US IN PARADISE:
WOMEN'S REVISIONS OF SACRED TEXTS 1
II. FROM BIBLICAL TO GNOSTIC: TONI MORRISON'S
BELOVED AND JAZZ 32
III. TRANSCENDENT MYTHMAKING: GNOSTIC SCRIPTURE
IN MORRISON'S PARADISE AND LESLIE MARMON SILKO'S
GARDENS IN THE DUNES 109
IV. A STAR MORE DISTANT THAN EDEN: BEYOND LUCILLE
AJ'JD LUCIFER 166
V. EPILOGUE..... 212
BIBLIOGRAPHY , , 218
Where at that Last Supper was a woman?
Someone to pour the wine,
a cautionary voice that might have said
Take it easy, boys,
This kind ofthing could get a fellow killed
A Seder without women, kids?
I'd edit the entire script.
-Miriam Kessler
IX
1
CHAPTER I
THE INDICTMENT SERVED ON US IN
PARADISE: WOMEN'S REVISIONS OF SACRED TEXTS
Uses of biblical imagery and allusion for political-often colonial, racist, and
patriarchal-purposes have a long history in the United States. Although the Judeo-
Christian tradition has not always been used as a vehicle of oppression in the Americas-
it has also been used as a means to resist oppression--(mis)interpretation and (mis)use of
biblical sacred texts has enabled injustice since the early days of the Republic.
Representations of the United States as a "New Eden," for example, were connected to
European expansion, and the hierarchies introduced in the biblical creation story served
as the justification for the subordination ofwomen, the colonization ofNative peoples,
and the enslavement ofAfricans. Indians (and later Africans) were conceived as the
"beasts" of the Garden in the narratives ofearly American colonialism. In many
instances, the biblical text itself seemed to encourage such oppression through ambiguous
language and narrative that could be applied to virtually any social or political scenario.
Genesis 1: 28, for example, appeared to encourage the logic of empire with its divine
mandate to "fill the earth and subdue it [and rule] over every living creature." Likewise,
the "Curse of Ham" was thought to explain and justify racism and the enslavement of
Africans since Noah cursed his grandson, Canaan (the son ofHam), by claiming in
Genesis 9: 25: "the lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers." The Canaanites were
believed to have settled in Africa. Many biblical passages in both the Old and New
2
Testaments sanction slavery, and even Jesus, who had the opportunity to speak against it
in Luke 12: 45-48, did not condemn the practice. l
These biblical precedents extended to social practice and literary production in the
United States: Jefferson Davis, for example, President ofthe Confederate States of
America from 1861 to 1865, claimed that slavery "was established by decree of Almighty
God... it is sanctioned in the Bible, in both Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation... it
has existed in all ages, has been found among the people of the highest civilization, and
in nations of the highest proficiency in the arts" (Rowland 286). Davis' contemporary,
U.S. Senator James H. Hammond further argued against abolition by claiming that "the
doom of Ham has been branded on the form and features of his African descendents"
(37-38).2 Likewise, in one ofthe earliest examples ofAmerican literature, Increase
Mather's "Introduction" to The Narrative ofthe Captivity and the Restoration ofMrs.
Mary Rowlandson, utilizes the "beastly" imagery of the Garden when he refers to Native
peoples as "wild, cruel, barbarous, brutish (in a word) diabolical creatures" (136). As late
as the twentieth century, D. H. Lawrence would persist in referring to the Native
American as "the demon of the continent" (qtd. in Bellin 1).
Beyond its racist and colonialist uses, biblical scripture has also been utilized to
serve patriarchal interests. After all, in the book of Genesis, God gives Adam the
authority to "rule over [Eve]" (3: 16). In 1 Corinthians, St. Paul claims that "the head of
the woman is man" (11: 3), and in Ephesians, he admonishes women to obey, saying
"wives, submit to your husbands" (5: 22). 1 Peter refers to women as the "weaker
partner" in marriage (3: 7). These passages and others throughout the Bible have
affirmed patriarchal practice and justified the suppression of the rights of women both
3
inside and outside the church. Together with their racist and colonialist uses they
structure the legacy of oppression that is the history of the United States. To this day,
Christian symbols and myths remain intimately linked to political power in both the
public and private sectors.
Not surprisingly, then, Christianity comes under scrutiny in the works of many
American writers, especially women concerned with challenging colonialism, racism, and
patriarchy. Because imaginative production serves as a primary site for the
dissemination, propagation, and deployment of cultural myths, literary rewritings of
religious scripture have been an important aspect of such scrutiny. This project analyzes
the ways American women writers rewrite sacred texts to scrutinize historical and
contemporary hegemonic practices. Specifically, I argue that women authors in the
twentieth century have revised biblical scripture as a way to criticize American history
and rewritten non-biblical sources to envision a future in which patriarchy, racism, and
colonialism are eradicated, in part, through the revival of suppressed cultural myths and
practices. I focus in particular on the strategies ofLucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, and
Leslie Marmon Silko to resist or redefine patriarchal Christianity and to establish
alternative traditions and power relations, either by filling in the gaps left in biblical
scripture (as Clifton does) or by recovering suppressed texts and traditions such as the
gnostic gospels (Morrison and Silko). Relying upon and frequently subverting the
authority of Christian and non-Christian sacred texts, these writers attempt to create new
myths as a foundation for social change.
While the oppressive potential of biblical scripture was a prominent feature of the
new Republic, resistance to the social hierarchies supported by the Bible emerged with
4
the establishment of the Puritan colonies. Although American feminist writers have
revised these central biblical narratives since the country's Puritan beginnings, those
early revisions were aimed only at obtaining authority for women writers and largely
ignored issues of race and colonialism. Amy Benson Brown's Rewriting the Word
contends that biblical revisionism has been a prominent feature of the literature of women
of the United States and links the earliest biblical revisions to the work of Puritan poets
Anne Bradstreet and Anne Hutchinson. In 1638, Anne Hutchinson was banished from
the Puritan community in Boston for her unorthodox biblical interpretations and
teachings, especially those espousing equality for women. Brown claims that although
Anne Bradstreet's relationship to the Bible remained in accordance with the orthodox
teachings of her Puritan community, her role as the first prominent American poet set the
stage for the biblical revisions of women who followed by defying conventional gendered
models of authority:
Though Anne Bradstreet was celebrated by her community while Anne
Hutchinson was banished, both Annes represent a usurpation of biblically
based structures of authority. The spirits of the dutiful daughter of
Puritanism and the'American Jezebel' enliven the biblical revisions of the
women who follow. (3)
Although Bradstreet didn't literally revise her biblical source, her relationship to it
changed due to her poetic aspirations and served as a model for writers she preceded.
These early practitioners of biblical revision, noted by Brown, were thus less interested in
revising the Bible itself as in incorporating it as a basis for their own authority. "Women
writers who engage the Bible," Brown continued, are negotiating "a reconstruction of
5
their literary inheritance and the authority oftheir own word" (3). After all, she
concluded, "'In the beginning was the Word' is both a challenge and a seduction to
someone who feels her own word to be less than powerful" (164). While this same logic
also motivates revisionist writers who follow Bradstreet and Hutchinson, it is clear that
what Brown refers to as the earliest examples of American biblical revisionism are
actually more symbolic than literal-aimed to gamer rather than subvert the authority of
the sacred text. By contrast, later revisionists tum to specific biblical passages and
narratives and revise them in the context of their contemporary historical moment, and
the authority these authors seek is largely outside the traditional sphere ofthe Bible.
They understand that the logic of sacred texts shapes cultural production, and cultural
production informs social structures, so lasting change relies on a radical revision of the
myths that structure society itself.
Beyond the Puritan beginnings illuminated by Brown, feminist biblical revisions
also played a central role in the early feminist movement of the late-nineteenth and early-
twentieth centuries, although, as critics have pointed out, that movement from its
inception was hardly monolithic. Many different perspectives emerged from a variety of
social and political contexts and experiences, all of which affected the treatment of
scriptural revision in feminist theology and in literature. It was during this first wave of
the feminist movement, however, that women began to articulate the idea that, contrary to
the popular rhetoric of the time, "the experience out of which Christian theology has
emerged is not universal experience but the experience of the dominant culture" (Grant
10). At the 1885 Annual Convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association, these
6
early feminists presented a manifesto that outlined the problem-albeit focused only on
women's oppression-as one rooted in faulty hermeneutics:
'WHEREAS, The dogmas incorporated in religious creeds derived from
Judaism, teaching that woman was an after-thought in the creation, her sex
a misfortune, marriage a condition of subordination, and maternity a curse,
are contrary to the law of God (as revealed in nature), and to the precepts
of Christ, and 'WHEREAS, These dogmas are an insidious poison,
sapping the vitality of our civilization, blighting woman, and, through her,
paralyzing humanity; therefore be it 'Resolved, That we call on the
Christian ministry, as leaders ofthought, to teach and enforce the
fundamental idea of creation, that man was made in the image of God,
male and female, and given equal rights over the earth, but none over each
other. And, furthermore, we ask their recognition of the scriptural
declaration that, in the Christian religion, there is neither male nor female,
bond nor free, but all are one in Christ Jesus. (qtd. in Grant 16)
Although these early feminists felt the problem lay, not with Christianity or the Bible, but
with false interpretations of scripture itself, they nonetheless proposed a direct' connection
between exclusive male imagery of God, the hierarchies expressed in the creation story,
and the structural oppression of women. Despite the fact that they were attuned to the
gendered inequalities derived from the logic of the Garden of Eden narrative and its use
historically, their argument lacked any discussion of the implications for racist and
colonialist misuse of biblical texts, a point taken up by women of color during the second
wave of the feminist movement.
7
At the time, however, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a social activist and leading
figure of the early women's movement, took the argument one step further when she
claimed that all systems, social and political-including ecclesiastical/religious
systems-are structured and maintained to limit the power ofwomen; she famously
authored The Woman's Bible in 1898 because she believed that "the Bible in its teachings
degrades Women from Genesis to Revelation" (inscription on verso). In Stanton's
conception, the Bible is not the inspired "Word of God," but, instead, "like any other
book, [written by men and] to be judged by its merits" (9). Her contention regarding the
overarching effects of religious doctrine on the suppression of the rights ofwomen
wasn't small, either:
The canon and civil law; church and state; priests and legislators; all
political parties and religious denominations have alike taught that woman
was made after man, of man, and for man, an inferior being, subject to
man. Creeds, codes, Scriptures and statutes, are all based on this idea.
Creeds, codes, forms, ceremonies and customs of society, church
ordinances and discipline all grow out of this idea. (7)
In fact, she continued, "the most bitter outspoken enemies of woman are found among
clergymen and bishops of the Protestant religion" (13). Stanton was among the first to
recognize the structural nature of oppression-the idea that institutions are organized to
maintain the power of the few at the expense of the many. Although Stanton had some
connections with the abolitionist movement of her day and was one of the friends of
Frederick Douglass, her focus was mainly on the structural oppression of women.
Stanton's objective in The Woman's Bible was to revise "those texts and chapters directly
8
referring to women, and those also in which women are made prominent by exclusion"
(5). The members of the Revising Committee, as Stanton described the process: "each [.
. .] purchased two Bibles, ran through them from Genesis to Revelations [sic], marking
all the texts that concerned women. The passages were then cut out, and pasted in a
blank book, and the commentaries then written underneath" (6). The work of Stanton
and her contemporaries to revise biblical texts was among the first of its kind, especially
during the early feminist movement. The authors of this study follow in her revisionary
model, since rather than merely incorporating biblical imagery and allusion to comment
on or illuminate larger societal ills, or to establish themselves as authorities in a society
which denies them power, they tum to the sacred text itself and revise the source as a
means to alter the society it structures.
The second wave of the feminist movement in the late-twentieth century likewise
introduced significant contributions to the field of feminist theology. As Jacquelyn Grant
argues in White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus, "a significant aspect of
contemporary [secular] feminism recaptures the spirit of nineteenth century feminists
such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in identifying religion as the root of the oppression of
women" (17). Feminist theology developed out ofthe second wave ofthe feminist
movement in the latter half of the twentieth century had, according to Grant, three
identifiable perspectives: "(1) the Biblical Feminist Perspective; (2) the Liberation
Feminist Perspective; and (3) the Rejectionist Feminist Perspective" (4). The Biblical
Feminist Perspective maintained the Bible "as the primary source oftheology. As such,
[it] provides a central authority which cannot be evaded. These persons are not biblical
literalists and, in fact, do approach the Bible with a critical, exegetical eye" (4).
9
Liberation Feminists are those who, like the proponents of various liberation theologies,
viewed God as the champion of the oppressed and thus committed to the liberation of
women in particular; in general, proponents of this view considered the Bible "as central
authority and define[d] their position primarily, though not exclusively, in relation to it"
or they "view[ed] Scripture as simply one, but not an overriding, source for doing
theology" (4). Finally, Rejectionist Feminists, according to Grant, "view[ed] both
scripture and tradition as irredeemably oppressive. [...] Both are rejected as sources for
the reflections of serious religious feminist thinkers" (5). In other words, the divine is
found outside the constraints of a corrupt patriarchal Christian system, historically
manipulated to preserve the status quo and maintain the power of the dominant.
Although the many theological perspectives to arise from the second wave of the feminist
movement are certainly more nuanced and varied than can be described briefly here,
these three positions remain helpful in articulating a basic framework for understanding
the feminist hermeneutics developed during this period.
Brown's study of the use of biblical revisions by American women writers
concludes by arguing that "the central subject of feminist biblical revision [...] is the
problems and possibilities of women's authority in a culture shaped by the masculine
hegemony that the Bible has come to represent" (163). Rather than merely claiming a
text that has historically provided authority for its (male) constituents, "feminist biblical
revision questions the very foundations of biblical and literary orthodoxy" itself (4). One
way writers have done this is through a revisionary model similar in structure to the one
defined by Grant as Liberation Feminism. The Catholic liberation theologian Elizabeth
Schussler Fiorenza argues that the Bible cannot be accepted in its entirety:
10
A feminist theological henneneutic of the Bible that has as its canon the
liberation of women from oppressive sexist texts, structures, institutions,
and internalized male values maintains that solely those traditions and
texts of the Bible that transcend their patriarchal culture and time have the
theological authority of revelation if the Bible should not continue to be a
tool for the patriarchal oppression of women. (qtd. in Grant 116-17)
Many American women writers engaged in feminist revisions of sacred texts fall under
the Liberation category. In The Red Tent, for example, Anita Diamant revises the story
ofDinah, who, in the book of Genesis, is named briefly and seemingly as an afterthought
at the end of a long list of her father Jacob's sons. She is only mentioned one other time,
after the murder of her husband by her brothers; even then she serves as a minor
character, and the story is told in the voice of an omniscient narrator who favors the male
perspective. The Red Tent counters the trivialization ofDinah and rewrites her story to
give her the voice scripture has denied her, starting with her childhood as the only
daughter among four mothers in the red tent. The novel engages contemporary debates
about gender and patriarchy by locating these issues in the familiar Genesis stories that
are at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition; it maintains a connection with the
tradition at the same time as it calls attention to the silences inherent in it, and as such, is
linked most closely with the Liberation Feminist position. The novel is one of many
similar examples.
The Rejectionist position, by contrast, argued that the entire spiritual tradition is
predicated upon corruption and should therefore be discarded: "Christianity itself should
be castrated by cutting away the products of super-male arrogance: the myth of sin and
11
salvation that are simply two diverse symptoms of the same disease" (qtd. in Grant
161). Rather than the Bible, goddess myths and other traditions for sacred texts could
offer more positive theological models for women. Although writing much earlier than
second-wave feminism, it is in a similarly rejectionist strain that H. D. writes:
she carries a book but it is not
the tome of the ancient wisdom,
the pages, I imagine, are the blank pages
of the unwritten volume of the new (qtd. in Ostriker 56)
This new book, then, while clearly echoing Pounds' modernist manifesto to "make it
new," is also engaged in a process of scriptural revision and means to replace the
corrupted text of the old. The fact that the poem's subject is gendered female indicates
that she, in particular, is in need of this "new" text. That H.D.'s own contribution to the
"new," the poem itself, takes the shape it does is an indicator that form, too, can be
implicated in structures of oppression. At the heart of these revisions is the insistence of
scriptural revisionists "on the power of writers and critics to shape our conception of the
ideal order" (Brown 10). In other words, the goal of scriptural revision is to destabilize
the authority of the Bible-that sacred text which provides fodder for the cultural myths
shaping society-and thereby alter society itself. Despite the importance and prevalence
of this strategy, very little critical attention has been paid to feminist revisions of sacred
texts. Ostriker's Feminist Revision and the Bible and Amy Benson Brown's Rewriting
the Word remain the central studies in the field of scriptural revision, and neither one
treats feminist rewritings of sacred texts other than the Bible. While other scholars have
12
analyzed these writers' use of the Bible, no critical work has yet examined feminist
rewritings in the primary texts I consider or addressed the intersections of race, class, and
gender in revisions of sacred texts, the central concern of this project.
Glaringly absent from the above discussion of the feminist movement is an
awareness of racism and colonialism as structures of oppression. As this absence makes
apparent, the women's movement itself was wrought with its own forms of racism, which
Hazel Carby and Patricia Hill Collins, among others, have pointed out. Grant, for her
part, claims that "the reality of racism in the feminist movement is testified to by the
conspicuous absence oflarge numbers of [women of color]" participating and "although
feminist theology has made an important critique of the sexist limitations of the dominant
theologies of Europe and North America, it is not without serious limitations, especially
when evaluated in the light of [the experience of women of color]" (36, 195). Both
Carby and Hill Collins have argued for a feminist critical practice that acknowledges the
importance of interrogating the interrelationships between race, class, and gender; Carby,
in particular, questions the concept ofa "sisterhood" of all women and argues against a
"feminist historiography and criticism which denies the hierarchical structuring of the
relations between black and white women and [...] takes the concerns ofmiddle-class,
articulate white women as a norm" (17). Grant draws parallels between these concerns
and feminist theology when she claims that the hermeneutics emerging from the second
wave of the women's movement arose "primarily out of Christian White women's
experiences with only token nuances given to Black women" (37). More, she claims
feminist theology has been racist when "the oppressor assumes the power of definition
and control while the oppressed is objectified and perceived as a thing. As such, White
13
women have defined the movement and presumed to do so not only for themselves but
also for non-White women" (199-200). Grant's challenge to the feminist theological
movement, then, is for an emerging perspective based on the experiences of women of
color. Any new feminist hermeneutic, claims Grant, must ensure it does not merely
reinforce the old, patriarchal system by recreating hierarchical social structures. Such a
perspective, as we shall see, has powerful repercussions for biblical interpretations and
for feminist theology in general. Since early misuses of the Bible served not only
patriarchal, but also racist and colonialist, purposes, so a revision of the damaging logic
of these sacred texts must have implications beyond the concerns of the largely white and
middle-class feminist movement.
Recent scholarship has attempted to fill the gaps in literary criticism and to
establish the basis for an early tradition of revisionist mythmaking among writers of
color. Joanna Brooks' American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise ofAfrican-American
and Native American Literatures (2004) contends that the African American and Native
American literary traditions have exhibited revisionist strains since at least as long as
women have revised the Bible to claim authority for their own written word. One clear
example is found in the early abolitionist movement from Phillis Wheatley, who
contended that American slaveholders were "modern Egyptians" (qtd. in Brooks 4).
Linking American slaveholding with Israel's slavery in Egypt, as narrated in the Old
Testament, Wheatley aligned African Americans with Israel, God's chosen people, and
upset the conventional structure that positioned European colonists as Israelites seeking
freedom in a "new land." Another example of early revisionist work is in the anti-
colonial texts ofPequot Methodist William Apess, who "used his ministerial office to
14
defend his tribal community and to challenge white supremacy" (179). In An Indian's
Looking Glass/or the White Man (1833)
Apess argued that Jesus Christ was not a white man, but rather a man of
color. His bold and altogether correct statement cancels the assumption of
godly assent and Christic solidarity so critical to American white
supremacy. It also exemplifies how American communities of color used
religious discourse to negate the racist presumptions directed against them
and how literature served as a space for the construction of newly resistant
identities and communities. (qtd. in Brooks 179)
Both African American and Native American authors, argues Brooks, "claimed for their
communities a distinctive place within God's grand design for the redemption of
humankind" (7). She further contends that "African- and Native American literatures [..
.] document the processes of social, cultural, and textual regeneration through which
communities of color developed positive and resistant identities" (49). To focus only on
feminist revisions in American literature, therefore, is to overlook a rich revisionary
tradition in both African American and Native American literature.
Early African American and Native authors, according to Brooks, chose to focus
on claiming and revising biblical narratives that resonated with their own experiences of
oppression in the Americas:
When they turned to their Bibles, African-American and Native American
authors sought out stories that honored their haunted and paradoxical
circumstances and offered some key into the mystery of personal and
community redemption. Their primary concern was not genesis but
15
regeneration: not the static economies ofprelapsarian innocence, but the
tumultuous and emancipatory traversing of the Red Sea, the forty years'
wandering in the wilderness, the deliverance from the tomb. The
collective character of their stories resemble not the prototypical American
Adam but instead an American Lazarus. (8)
From these early experiences arose a literary tradition with roots in the same sacred text
as the one used by colonists as a justification for slavery and colonization, but with
entirely different repercussions. Ultimately, pioneering black and Indian writers revised
and "redirected the democratizing, charismatic, and separatist energies ofAmerican
evangelicalism and its powerful doctrine ofrebirth into the formation of new religious
communities, new theologies, and new literatures for people of color" (3). Lucille
Clifton, whose revisions of the Lucifer figure in particular will be the focus of Chapter
IV, is a key example of the work contemporary women of color have done to challenge
normative (white) biblical interpretations in literature; she revises biblical characters to
address racialized and gendered social exclusions in the United States. Clifton
transforms biblical characters into ordinary people who often speak in dialect; the result,
in Akasha (Gloria) Hull's words, is "perhaps the most heterodox (for some readers) of
Clifton's stratagems [because she] 'levels' these biblical figures by making them racially
black" (280). By "leveling" biblical characters, Clifton challenges traditional
interpretations that racialize these figures as white. Her revisions resonate particularly
well with the feminist theories ofHazel Carby and Patricia Hill Collins, who reject the
normalcy of whiteness and "the notion of a generic woman who is white and middle
16
class" (Collins 8). Clifton furthers their critique by exposing the racist assumptions
located at the heart of both patriarchal Christianity and the women's movement.
Not only do Morrison, Silko, and Clifton, the subjects of the chapters that follow,
utilize the Bible for revisionist purposes, they also draw upon other sacred texts, such as
the gnostic texts, some of which valorize the feminine, to scrutinize and find alternatives
to patriarchy and other hegemonic practices. Such rewritings of sacred texts have been
especially prevalent since the second wave ofthe feminist movement. Critics have
identified feminist scriptural revision in the works of Adrienne Rich, Gloria Naylor,
Margaret Atwood, and Toni Morrison which retain as their "central fiction or fantasy"
not Freud's speculation about a repressed and "slain Father but the slain (and immortal)
Mother" (Brown 6, Ostriker 36). The late 1980s and early 1990s, in particular, saw a rise
in texts rewriting religious scripture from non-biblical traditions. Historian Elaine
Pagels' seminal text, The Gnostic Gospels, has played a critical role in the increased
attention given to religious scripture suppressed by orthodox Christianity and the
potential such texts hold for women writers interested in recovering alternative
epistemologies. Recent scholarship on the gnostic texts discovered in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries has revealed the potential they hold for alternative projects in
historiography, especially because the sheer volume of interpretations they inspire
emphasize plurality and hybridity over stagnant and inflexible religious hermeneutics. It
is primarily for this reason that they offer attractive alternatives for women of color
engaged in scriptural revision.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the biggest challenge I faced while writing and
researching this project was the issue of how to treat the sacred texts themselves. All of
17
them are in translation, all of them subject to myriad and disparate interpretations by
theologians and historians, and all of them incorporated into fictional and poetic works
already having been interpreted in very specific ways by the author utilizing them for
their own purposes. More troubling still, very little was and is actually known about the
social realities of the Gnostics-what a typical day was like, for example, or even what a
Gnostic home or church was like-thus creating a disembodied religious tradition that
lent itself to whatever imagination was wielding it. How then, was I supposed to separate
what the text originally said from what it had become as a cultural marker? In this
regard, the gnostic texts were most problematic because I had to consider the fact that
much of the recent scholarship on these gnostic texts was unavailable to Morrison and
Silko in the 1980s and 1990s when Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, and Gardens in the Dunes
were being written and published. What I did know was that both Morrison and Silko
knew Pagels and were aware of her bestselling book, The Gnostic Gospels-published in
1979-Morrison because of their interactions as colleagues at Princeton and Silko
because they were both in the first group of MacArthur Fellows together. Morrison is
said to have met with Pagels regularly, and Silko has explicitly stated in interviews that
she wrote Gardens in response to Pagels' book on the gnostic texts (Leonard, Arnold).
What I have primarily chosen to focus on in this project, then, is the way each author
utilizes the sacred text, in her own historical context, rather than to be overly concerned
with the accuracy or inaccuracy ofher hermeneutics. In fact, the project of looking at
revisions of sacred texts assumes that in many cases the author intentionally rewrites the
original text for her own purposes. Finally, the gnostic texts can be understood, perhaps,
as attractive to authors engaged in revisionary projects precisely because the disembodied
18
religious tradition connected with them offers an appealing way to circumvent the
often disturbing parallels drawn when aligning a work with a tradition, like Judeo-
Christianity, that has been haunted by centuries of patriarchal, racist, and colonial history.
For my own understanding of the gnostic tradition, however, I looked to the
recent scholarship of Karen L. King, among others.3 Her work encourages the
understanding that, far from being a monolithic movement or even a religion in its own
right, Gnosticism derived its sources from various traditions and was characterized by
hybridity rather than purity. In fact, both Gnosticism and early Christianity should be
understood as having been highly diverse religious traditions. R. VanDen Broek
corroborates this general point in "The Present State of Gnostic Studies" when he argues
that
Gnosticism is one of the most complex and variegated religious
phenomena of Antiquity. In its mythology and doctrines there are distinct
Jewish and Platonic elements, which seem to reach back to its first
developments. But it cannot be explained exclusively from Judaism or
Platonism, and certainly not from Christianity [...]. Not any of the
exclusive explanations of its origin is satisfactory. But there is no doubt
that it was only in its Christian fonn that Gnosticism became really
important and was able to exert a lasting influence, not only on the
development of Christian theology, but also on western thought in general.
In this respect, the study of Gnosticism is still in its infancy. (71)
A central feature of early Christianity's attempts to define itself, the gnostic texts were
often used as juxtaposition against the "orthodoxy" and were consequently labeled as
19
"heresy." Of course, in reality, the divisions between Christianity and Gnosticism
were never so definite. Although some gnostic texts valorize the feminine, as the work of
Morrison and Silko suggests, many others did not. Yet despite the fact that the gnostic
texts may not have ultimately become the panacea for the evils of patriarchal Christianity
that perhaps in those early years it had been hoped they might, the work of this project
shows that they still held potential for women writers interested in recovering alternative
epistemologies and alternative historiographic projects. At the very least, they make
possible a reevaluation ofhistory in general-and of the discourses, processes, and
practices that enable and maintain power for the few.
Most of the gnostic sources under consideration by women engaged in projects of
scriptural revision were discovered, often for the first time, among the codices unearthed
at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945. Bound in a monastery in the fourth century (as
testified by the papyri found in the covers of the codices), these texts are believed to have
been the collection of a group ofmonks who read them as edifying literature and who
buried them when the attack on texts considered heretical by the orthodoxy became
severe following Athanasius' famous "Easter Letter" of367 C.E. (Van Den Broek 47).
Problems of classification abound in the Nag Hammadi collection: some ofthe texts are
considered gnostic, others are not, and scholars are often divided in their definitions.
"Thunder, Perfect Mind," for example, a poem contained in the codices and which both
Morrison and Silko utilize in their revisions, is considered by R. Van Den Broek to be
"non-gnostic" but by Pagels as "gnostic" (48-9, 55). Since it is certain that both authors
were familiar with Pagels' work, I can only assume that they, too, would have had a
general understanding of the poem as "gnostic." It is for this reason that I refer
20
throughout the project to "Thunder, Perfect Mind" as a gnostic text.
Once again, though, even the term "Gnostic" is problematic. In What is
Gnosticism? King argues that Gnosticism has "mistakenly come to be thought of as a
distinctive Christian heresy or even as a religion in its own right" (2). By contrast, she
claims:
There was and is no such thing as Gnosticism, if we mean by that some
kind of ancient religious entity with a single origin and a distinct set of
characteristics. Gnosticism is, rather, a term invented in the early modem
period to aid in defining the boundaries of normative Christianity. (1-2)4
The problem with this construction, continues King, is that "the early Christian
polemicists' discourse of orthodoxy and heresy [became] intertwined with twentieth-
century scholarship on Gnosticism" to such an extent that it "distorted our analysis of the
ancient texts" (19). Such discussions create identity binaries (Christian/Gnostic,
orthodoxylheresy) rather than acknowledge the ways such texts may overlap with or help
to illuminate the meaning of canonized scripture and vice versa. Furthermore, they blur
the fact that "hybridity, not purity, characterizes historical processes" (230). Discussions
that focus on qualities of "purity" and "contamination" are, according to King, "therefore
not amenable to historical analysis" (229). Finally, King argues that the wide range of
texts and "the variety of phenomena classified as 'Gnostic' simply will not support a
single, monolithic definition" (226). In a similar vein, Pagels observes that "most
scholars now agree that what we call 'gnosticism' was a widespread movement that
derived its sources from various traditions" (xxxii). In light ofthese scholars'
discussions, then, it seems prudent to use the term carefully and to avoid generalizations
21
that mayor may not apply to specific texts. For this reason, I follow Pagels's lead and
refer to the texts as "gnostic" (in accordance with the meaning ofgnosis, translated as
"knowledge" or "insight") rather than "Gnostic" (referring to an embodied-and
nonexistent-religious tradition).
The gnostic texts as such still hold the potential for a reevaluation of the master
narrative of history. After all, as King refers to it, the "master story" of history is always
the narrative of the winner: "much of early Christian history has been a matter of adding
details or making minor corrections to the basic plot provided by those who won for
themselves the title of orthodoxy" (157). Gnostic theology challenges the authority of the
orthodox. Interestingly, gnostic believers often thought of themselves as an elite group in
possession of a knowledge unknown to the majority. In fact, the word "gnostic" itself
derives from the Greek word gnosis, usually translated as "knowledge" or "insight." As
Elaine Pagels points out in The Gnostic Gospels, the secret ofgnosis is the understanding
that "to know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God" (xix).
Perhaps more heterodoxically, ''whoever achieves gnosis becomes 'no longer a Christian,
but a Christ'" (134). Although there were other reasons why the early Church considered
these texts heretical, this central gnostic claim, that true spirituality must be unmediated
by Church authority, had the potential for making them the most uncomfortable. After
all, in its most basic formulation, gnostic scripture questioned the authority of the master
narrative of its time and asserted its own version of true spirituality.
One of the most significant developments to arise from the debates surrounding
the history and nature of the early Christian church, however, is the light they may shed
on the issue of women's leadership potential in ecclesiastical-and indeed, social-roles.
22
The orthodox position holds that no woman should have authority over man. 1
Timothy 2: 11-14, for example, explicitly prohibits women from holding positions of
authority: "Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to
teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first,
then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a
transgressor." By contrast, Pagels contends that "many of [the gnostic] texts speak of
God as a dyad who embraces both masculine and feminine elements" (49). Likewise, the
Gospel of Mary, a gnostic text ofwhich only three known fragments remain, features
Mary Magdalene as a beloved disciple of Christ and challenges normative constructions
regarding gender roles in the church and larger society it structures. In The Gospel of
Mary ofMagdala, King argues that "the theology of the Gospel ofMary may well have
been informed by [an early tradition of] women's theology-making. Until its discovery
we knew ofno gospel ascribed to a woman and calling upon her to guarantee the
credibility and authority of the work" (185). This discovery, contends King, is not
entirely surprising, considering "we know that in the early centuries and throughout
Christian history, women played prominent roles as apostles, teachers, preachers, and
prophets" (160). What developed into "orthodoxy," then-evidenced in the misogynist
teachings of the author of 1 Timothy-was therefore a construction of later centuries:
the patriarchal and hierarchical leadership of the church developed only
slowly over time and out of a wide variety of possibilities. [...] The
historical importance of the Gospel ofMary lies in letting us see the
contours of some crucial debates over the authority of apostolic tradition,
prophetic experience, and women's leadership. (187-88, 190)
Although Clifton does not explicitly incorporate gnostic revisions into her work, both
Morrison and Silko do, and the issue of women's spiritual authority and leadership
potential is a central aspect of all three authors featured in this study.
Of course, even the presence of women in gnostic texts does not indicate
that the social context of such texts was necessarily more favorable for women or
that all gnostic texts valorize the feminine. While it is tempting to characterize
the gnostic tradition as one that unanimously celebrates the feminine (and hence
as being in direct opposition to patriarchal Christianity), the texts themselves do
not necessarily support this assertion. Pagels herself points out that "gnostics
were not unanimous in affirming women-nor were the orthodox unanimous in
denigrating them" (66). More, as Images ofthe Feminine in Gnosticism attests,
there are "many problems inherent in a description of gender imagery in
Gnosticism," the first of which is the problem of determining "when a gendered
image is being used for the sake of its gendered characteristics" ("Editor's
Foreword" xii). Rather than serving as markers of historical accuracy, then, or
evidence of a widespread celebration of the feminine in the Greco-Roman world,
the texts may only use gendered imagery as a formal or stylistic technique:
In some cases, gendered imagery is centrally significant because of its
gendered character; in other cases, gendered imagery may be present only
because it is part of the tradition or because it is related to the myth or
theology as gendered imagery in a different context. (xii)
In evaluating the incorporation or revision of gnostic scripture in contemporary
literature, then, it is important to determine the role the feminine plays in each
23
24
specific text, as well as the social, political, or literary purposes they serve for the
author using them.
Still, that task can be daunting. In What is Gnosticism? King provides two
suggestions for disentangling historical methods from this problematic apparatus:
First, as Elisabeth Shussler Fiorenza has argued, historians must scrutinize
their goals in order to make historiography's ethical character apparent
and subject to critique. Though historiography will always be involved in
power relations, such relations need not operate under clandestine cover.
Second, historiography can do its work better once it has been
disentangled from a focus on origins, purity, and essence. None of these
has a legitimate place in historical research, given that historical
phenomena never have a pure origin but are always in media res; given
that there is no purity, only mixtures; no essence, only continuity in
difference. (218)
Rather than thinking of the gnostic texts as "heretical" and in opposition to the
"orthodoxy," King argues it is more productive to see them as variations, contributions,
alternatives, reinterpretations, and additions to a syncretic religious tradition that was
never as monolithic as the "master story" would tell it. "Viewed this way," continues
King, "the study of ancient cultural hybridity should focus less on identifying which
materials are combined in syncretic amalgamation than on the discourses, processes, and
practices by which people make sense of their lives [...] and the power relations that are
at stake" (231). Since literature is often the place where crucial debates about identity,
community, and nation are staged, it makes sense that American women writers of the
25
late-twentieth century are employing these gnostic texts in their work as a way to
revise and suggest alternatives to patriarchal Christianity and the society it has structured.
All the writers in this study consider not only the patriarchal but also the racist
and colonialist dimensions of Christianity. As such, they are engaged in very different
projects than Anne Hutchinson, Anne Bradstreet, or even H. D. or Anita Diamant.
Chapter II, "From Biblical To Gnostic: Toni Morrison's Beloved and Jazz," argues that
Morrison rewrites both biblical and gnostic sources in order to criticize and suggest
alternatives to patriarchal, racist American history in the first two novels of her trilogy
encompassing Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise. Biblical scripture informs the entire trilogy,
which spans the violent history ofAfrican America from slavery to the Civil Rights era,
but critics have neglected the transition Morrison makes from biblical to gnostic concerns
in the first two books of the trilogy. Morrison has insisted in Playing in the Dark that
responsible literary criticism must step back from looking inside the "fishbowl" of
narrative production to notice the bowl itself-the invisible form that gives structure to
the world it contains. One of the least scrutinized ofthese "fishbowl" forms is the effect
of sacred texts on the production of social and cultural codes and, consequently, on the
narrative forms which reflect and reinscribe them. Morrison's trilogy, I argue, is
informed by her argument in Playing in the Dark and asserts that history repeats itself
without the revision of destructive myths and cultural practices; each novel articulates a
different formal argument and is concerned with the way biblical language and narrative
forms are proliferated through apocalyptic and utopian narrative strategies (Beloved and
Paradise), as well as through the use of omniscient narration (Jazz).5
26
Both Morrison's last novel in the trilogy, Paradise, and Leslie Marmon Silko's
Gardens in the Dunes rely heavily on gnostic rather than Christian wisdom texts, and
Chapter III, "Transcendent Mythmaking: Gnostic Scripture in Toni Morrison's Paradise
and Leslie Marmon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes," analyzes the ways these novels
recover and rewrite scripture that valorizes the feminine and that has been suppressed by
the Judeo-Christian tradition. Paradise condemns American racism and patriarchy even
as it scrutinizes the violent strategies central to nation building as undertaken by the
militant Black Power movement in the 1960s. Morrison incorporates the gnostic poem
"Thunder, Perfect Mind" in the novel's epigraph, spoken by a feminine, divine power, in
an attempt to locate a feminist worldview that, unlike the social dynamics that Morrison
scrutinizes, is premised on inclusivity. This chapter explores how the gnostic belief
regarding paradox, as articulated in "Thunder, Perfect Mind," challenges and provides an
alternative to the U.S. histories described in the trilogy. Like Paradise, Gardens
incorporates the gnostic poem, "Thunder, Perfect Mind" as a counterpoint to the Judeo-
Christian tradition that justifies U.S. colonialism; criticizing the history and effects of
colonialism on Native people and the land they inhabit is a primary goal of the novel. I
argue that Gardens contrasts a feminist epistemology derived from the gnostic gospels
with a colonial worldview (exemplified by Edward, a botanist and collector of rare
orchids) to criticize the colonization ofNative America. At the same time, through the
character of Hattie, a well-intentioned (but white) woman, it complicates this contrast by
showing feminist complicity in the colonial project.
The final chapter-"A Star More Distant Than Eden: Beyond Lucille and
Lucifer"--eoncludes the discussion by considering Clifton's revisionary work to reclaim
27
the infamous biblical Prince of Darkness, Lucifer. In her "tree oflife" and "brothers"
sequences, found in Quilting and The Book ofLight, respectively, Clifton rewrites the
Eden myth that has been a key feature in American literature in general and in the
African American tradition in particular; by aligning herself with Lucifer, Clifton claims
poetic authority for herself through this surprising figure of God's archenemy and
reclaims him as a figure of "light"-rather than "darkness" or evil-through the shared
etymological roots of both their names. Casting the figure of Lucifer as black and
female, Clifton rewrites him as part of the divine and positions herself to receive the
Word from this unlikely source. In "the message," however, a sequence of twenty-three
poems found at the end of Mercy (2004), Clifton turns away from the Bible-that "tome
of the ancient wisdom"-and works to establish an entirely new sacred text.
All three authors considered in this study are deeply concerned with the ways
racist, colonialist, and patriarchal language inherited from sacred texts is encoded in
literature and passed down through seemingly innocuous narrative strategies and literary
practices. The work they do to expose the destructive potential of biblical imagery and
allusion in cultural production and to revise sacred texts to create new myths from the
salvage is remarkable.6 Although American literature is a treasure trove, as Morrison
claims in Playing in the Dark, certain texts are exceptional in their awareness of the
modes of oppression that structure society, even at the level oflanguage: "How
compelling is the study of those writers who take responsibility for all ofthe values they
bring to their art. How stunning is the achievement of those who have searched for and
mined a shareable language for the words to say it" (xiii). Toni Morrison, Leslie
Marmon Silko, and Lucille Clifton are three such writers, and their work is testament to
--------_._----
28
the powerful revisionary currents in American literature by women authors of the late-
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
29
NOTES
1 Neither did Paul, who in 1 Corinthians 12: 13, Galatians 3: 28, and Colossians
3: 11 argued that both slaves and free men were sons of God but neither condemned the
practice of slavery nor acknowledged any evil in it. Paul returned a runaway slave to his
owner, despite the fact that Deuteronomy 23: 15-16 requires a Jew to protect a runaway
slave. See the Letter to Philemon in the New Testament.
For passages in the Old and New Testaments that sanction and regulate the
practice of slavery, see especially: Exodus 20: 17, Deuteronomy 5: 21, Exodus 21: 20-21,
Exodus 21: 1-4, Deuteronomy 15: 12-18, Exodus 21: 7, Leviticus 25: 44-46, Leviticus
25: 48-53, Exodus 21: 8, Leviticus 19: 20-22, Leviticus 25: 39, Exodus 21: 16,
Deuteronomy 24: 7, Exodus 22: 3,2 Kings 4: 1, Deuteronomy 21: 10-14, Deuteronomy
20: 14, Deuteronomy 23: 15-16, Genesis 17: 13, Genesis 17: 27, Numbers 31: 28-47,2
Samuel 9: 10, Genesis 16: 1-2, Genesis 30: 3-4, Genesis 30: 9-10, Exodus 20: 10,
Matthew 18: 25, Mark 14: 66, Luke 12: 45-48, Ephesians 6: 5-9, Colossians 4: 1, 1
Timothy 6: 1-3.
2 See Selections from the Letters and Speeches ofHon. James H Hammond
(1866).
3 Also helpful in my pursuit was R. Van Den Broek's "The Present State of
Gnostic Studies" in Vigiliae Christianae (1983) and Edwin M. Yamauchi's Pre-Christian
Gnosticism (1973).
4 Although reviews of What is Gnosticism? have been for the most part positive,
some critics have resisted King's deconstruction of the term "Gnosticism" and counter
30
that her argument against essentialist religious hermeneutics (heresy/orthodoxy) breaks
down in her own claim that ''there was and is no such thing as Gnosticism." M. J.
Edwards, in particular, argues that
although the term 'Gnosticism' is (as King holds) so factitious as to be
useless for any object but polemic, that is not to say that Gnostics never
existed, and we shall not see that past more clearly-we shall simply see
nothing at all-if we refuse to admit that something may already have
been discovered during a hundred years ofvigorous research. (202)
See also Paul A. Mirecki's review of What is Gnosticism? in Catholic Biblical Quarterly
(2005), Michael C. McCarthy's review in Theological Studies (2004), and Alastair H. B.
Logan's review in Journal ofContemporary Religion (2004). Reviews of Elaine Pagels'
The Gnostic Gospels were also primarily positive. See in particular the reviews ofDavid
P. Efroymson, Brian Hayes, Alan F. Segal, and G. Quispel.
5 "Apocalyptic" is another problematic term for religious studies scholars and
will be discussed in more detail in Chapter III.
6 Particularly informative regarding biblical allusion and imagery has been
Richard B. Hays' Echoes ofScripture in the Letters ofPaul (1989), which points out the
ways Paul was already engaged in a project of scriptural revisions when he wrote the
"letters" which are now a part of the canonized Christian New Testament. Hays contends
that Paul was "rewriting" the scripture of the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the
Hebrew Bible dating from the second or third century B.C.E. and which was in common
use in Hellenistic synagogues during Paul's lifetime, for his own theological purposes
31
(xi). The Bible itself, then, should be understood as the product of an interpretative
tradition, and "the revisionary hermeneutical operations that later came to be called
midrash were already manifest in the work of the writers of the biblical texts, who
collected, interpreted, and transmuted still earlier texts and traditions" (14). Hays' work
is a reminder that intertextuality is a feature of most, if not all, literary works and that
degree and intensity of literary allusion and echo can be judged by seven basic criteria: 1)
availability, 2) volume, 3) recurrence, 4) thematic coherence, 5) historical plausibility, 6)
history of interpretation, and 7) satisfaction (the effect ofthe intertextual relation on the
reader) (29-32).
32
CHAPTER II
FROM BIBLICAL TO GNOSTIC:
TONI MORRISON'S BELOVED AND JAZZ
When Toni Morrison first began to conceptualize the project that would
ultimately become Beloved, she envisioned a much longer text with a broader historical
scope. In fact, in an interview just after the publication of Beloved, Morrison indicated
she felt a sense of failure when she handed the first manuscript to her editor (Taylor-
Guthrie 240). What was originally envisioned as one novel eventually became three
distinct texts: Morrison's trilogy encompassing Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise recounts
African American history from slavery through the Civil Rights era. During the course
of this retelling, which encompasses two centuries ofAfrican American experience,
Morrison introduces dozens of characters, plots, and subplots; some of them function
intertextually to bring together Morrison's larger revision of American and African
American history. In this revisionary project, Morrison is primarily concerned with
uncovering and highlighting the terrible violence in American history that is formative
yet unacknowledged. Part of the reason this history isn't acknowledged is that certain
people have been unable to enter dominant discourse. The most prominent figure in all
three novels is the image ofBeloved herself, broadly representative of the ghost of
millions affected by the haunting legacy of slavery and its aftereffects. Beloved returns
in Jazz as Wild, and in Paradise as the Convent women living on the outskirts of the
patriarchal community ofRuby. Her presence in all three novels points to the way each
book of the trilogy demonstrates analogous concerns and works to recover suppressed
33
perspectives that resist the erasure of narratives exposing the violence of slavery. In
particular, it shows Morrison's work to give voice to the silenced "Beloveds" of African
American history by exposing the various methods and forms maintained to silence her.
That nearly all of the "Beloveds" ofMorrison's historiographic and revisionary project
are women of color indicates that the convergence of race and gender remains a central
consideration. At the heart of her analysis is a concern with the problematic ways
resistance unfolds, often by incorporating and adopting social structures and ideologies of
the oppressor such as patriarchy and Christianity. Morrison contends throughout the
trilogy that, in the Mrican American tradition especially, these two systems have allowed
access to power for some (often African American men) at the expense of others
(typically women of color). At the same time, she doesn't merely posit an argument for
inclusion; for Morrison, the nature of American society itself is the problem, not just its
consequences.
Morrison organizes her revision of American history in part around an
examination of what she refers to as the invisible structures created by sacred texts that
are embedded in social and cultural practices and which playa significant role in social
power. As she contends in Playing in the Dark, responsible literary criticism steps back
from looking at the narrative alone to noticing the social and cultural codes that help to
structure it. Failing to do so, as Morrison figures it, is like an onlooker gazing into a
fishbowl without noticing the bowl itself:
It is as if I had been looking at a fishbowl-the glide and flick of the
golden scales [...]; the castles at the bottom, surrounded by pebbles and
tiny, intricate fronds of green; the barely disturbed water, [...] , the
34
tranquil bubbles traveling to the surface-and suddenly I saw the bowl, the
structure that transparently (and invisibly) pennits the ordered life it
contains to exist in the larger world. (17)
Although in this specific passage in Playing in the Dark Morrison calls attention to what
she refers to as an Africanist presence in American literature by white authors, her
argument about the transparent, invisible fonns that infonn the literary imagination is a
central theme in her fictional work as well. The novels are especially concerned with the
way biblical language and narrative fonns are proliferated in literature through
apocalyptic and utopian narrative strategies, as well as through the use of first-person,
omniscient narration. In literally hundreds of instances throughout the trilogy, Morrison
exposes the ubiquity of biblical language in everyday, colloquial speech. Although she
doesn't present all biblical narratives as unifonnly oppressive, she does call attention to
those with historically destructive uses (in the trilogy she is concerned mainly with the
three fonns indicated above). In this way, Morrison insists upon a revision of these
elements of Christianity without ultimately rejecting a tradition that has at the same time
played a critical role in African American liberation strategies.
In Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, in particular, Morrison exposes the ways the
language of sacred texts structures apocalyptic and utopian narrative fonns, as well as the
use of narrative voice, and she has referred specifically to the role of these texts in her
"Nobel Lecture in Literature": "sexist language, racist language, theistic language-all
are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not, pennit new
knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas" (16-7). Sexist, racist, and theistic
language is what Morrison refers to as "dead language"; it "has no desire or purpose
35
other than to maintain the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity
and dominance; [...] it "cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell
another story, [or] fill baffling silences" (13-4). Ultimately, such language "must be
rejected, altered and exposed" (16). Although each of these forms oflanguage-sexist,
racist, theistic-has different expressions and manifestations in everyday usage and in
cultural production, they all overlap in one critical way. Each relies on a hierarchical
model of ordering in social relationships and supports a dualistic worldview that
privileges one binary relationship over the other. However, it is important to note that all
biblical language is not necessarily theistic language-the latter refers specifically to
biblical language that supports the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent
perspective to which all others are subordinate or which has been (mis)interpreted and
(mis)used toward these ends. This, of course, is largely the way American history has
been told and the work Morrison's revisionary project labors to overcome.
The term "apocalyptic" requires further definition at this juncture. In Apocalypse:
The Morphology ofa Genre, John J. Collins indicates that "scholars distinguish between
'apocalypse' as a literature genre, 'apocalyptic eschatology' as a particular religious
perspective and structure ofthought, and 'apocalypticism' as a sociological ideology"
(3).1 Since this project is concerned with literary genres, I will be using the term
"apocalypse" in reference to these texts. As Collins further notes, "apocalypse" is
a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a
revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient,
disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it
36
envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial, insofar as it involves another,
supernatural world. (9)
Many, though not all, of literary apocalypses end with a vision of destruction and then
reveal an ultimate transfonnation, or transcendence, ofhuman affairs and the human
condition. Morrison, for her part, relies primarily on the biblical Revelation of John in
regards to the Christian tradition, but she is clearly aware of the larger tradition of literary
apocalypse, of which there are many variations, including Jewish apocalypses, early
Christian apocalypses, gnostic apocalypses, Greek and Latin apocalypses, and Rabbinic
literature and mysticism with elements of apocalypse and the "apocalyptic" (i). Of the
gnostic apocalypses, there are a few distinguishing features; first, "the visual element in
the revelation is very slight and often consists only ofthe apparition ofthe mediator," and
second and "even more strikingly, the content of the Gnostic apocalypses places its
greatest emphasis on salvation through knowledge, which is extended into personal
afterlife" (13). This version of apocalypse seems to fit most closely with Sethe's own
"revelation" at the end of Beloved (with Beloved herself serving as the otherworldly
mediator) and will be discussed in detail as the chapter proceeds.
Because Morrison is interested in the ways theistic language gets imbedded into
literatures in often unconsciously self-destructive ways, Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise
explore the influence of sacred texts on the process of literary production; each of the
texts has a distinct fonnal argument, tied to a biblical precedent that infonns its usage in
narrative production. Beloved and Jazz in particular narrate their fonnal concerns
through a shift from biblical to gnostic revisions, amending theistic language to
incorporate suppressed perspectives (largely of slaves and women of color) in African
37
American and American history from the nineteenth century through the Harlem
Renaissance. Paradise extends these revisions through an examination of the gender
hierarchies inherited from sacred texts and handed down by a largely male African
American leadership during the Civil Rights era. All three novels ultimately argue the
same central point: history repeats itself without the revision oflimiting and destructive
myths and cultural practices.
To counter these inherited narrative strategies, Morrison incorporates the gnostic
texts discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945 (at first subtly in Beloved and then more
explicitly in Jazz and Paradise) and especially the gnostic poem, "Thunder, Perfect
Mind." While never ultimately replacing the orthodox Judeo-Christian tradition in
Morrison's trilogy, these texts destabilize the authority of the "master scripture" to the
point that it all but crumbles under the pressure to revise its limiting theologies.
Especially because the gnostic text Morrison has chosen to focus on as an alternative
foundation for her historiography-"Thunder, Perfect Mind"-is oriented around the
feminine and encourages a complex and paradoxical worldview that sees difference as
integral to wholeness, it holds the potential to disrupt the dualism inherent in both
patriarchy and racism. This is not to suggest, however, that the gnostic tradition itself
was not dualistic, and here Morrison appears to be making a distinction between two
models ofdualism: the Iranian (or Manichaean) and the Syrian-Egyptian. According to
Hans Jonas, both models are gnostic in formulation and "dualistic" in the sense that "they
were evolved to explain essentially the same facts of a dislocated metaphysical situation
[...J: the existing rift between God and world, world and man, spirit and flesh" (236-37).
The Iranian, or Manichaean, branch explains this rift as a dualism of two opposing
38
principles (i.e. how "the original Darkness" overtook "the Light" and the resulting
"mixing and unmixing, captivity and liberation" that became man's fate (237). The
Syrian-Egyptian model, on the other hand, undertook "the more ambitious task of
deriving dualism itself," explaining "Darkness" as a product, rather than a cause "forced
upon [Light] from outside" as in the Iranian model (237). In other words, difference
exists internally, and all things have an "opposite" that appears simultaneously (and often
necessarily) alongside its pair. Ultimately, Jonas contends that "the Syrian[-Egyptian]
type is profounder, and alone of the two [...] can do full justice to the redemptional
claim made on behalf ofknowledge throughout gnostic religion" (237).
"Thunder, Perfect Mind" can be said to follow the latter model of dualism in its
emphasis on paradox and a unity of "opposites." As mentioned in the first chapter,
however, the poem itself is difficult to classify: remember that Van Der Broak called it
"non-gnostic" while Pagels referred to it as gnostic (Bentley Layton also refers to the
poem as gnostic). More, its origin is also unclear; Nag Hammadi Texts and the Bible
locates both Christian and Jewish influence in the poem (especially Proverbs 8-spoken
by a female character, "Wisdom"), while Layton notes the Greek influence of the
"riddle" genre in "The Riddle of the Thunder (NHC VI, 2): The Function of Paradox in a
Gnostic Text from Nag Hammadi." He refers to the feminine, divine speaker of the
poem as "Dame Wisdom" (38). Regardless ofwho exactly the speaker is-and Morrison
never explicitly names her-the text is a monologue, and the speaker identifies herself as
a paradox of balanced antitheses among which "I am godless, and I am the one whose
God is great" is but one example ofmany. The model ofdualism that "Thunder, Perfect
Mind" appears to support and that Pagels' works seems also to affirm (that is, a paradox
39
wherein each thing has an "opposite" that exists simultaneously, and necessarily,
alongside its pair) would no doubt be attractive to Morrison as model for diversity and
inclusion. It is perhaps for this reason that she structures both Jazz and Paradise around
the idea of paradox found in "Thunder, Perfect Mind" and featured in the epigraph of
each novel.
Because narrative, according to Morrison, also motivates cultural practices, she is
keenly aware that it must be scrutinized for harmful or destructive elements handed down
from a dominant culture determined to preserve its status at all costs (7). By locating and
exposing the "fishbowl" in conventional forms of American literature-those forms that
give literary texts structure and coherence and which often derive from theistic language
and practice-Morrison evaluates their effectiveness (or lack thereof) for African
American authors and posits alternatives that contribute new knowledge and new choices
to the reader. The significance of such a revisionist project is that it seeks to expose
harmful, deeply ingrained elements of "the national mind," and, as Morrison has
repeatedly illustrated in her own critical work, the influence of literary production on
social and cultural practice makes it clear that this is an important project (14). It is also
crucial to the success of a variety of liberation movements because it interrogates the
intersections of race and gender by focusing almost exclusively on the experiences of
women of color.
When a very pregnant Beloved disappears into the woods at the end of the novel
named after her, she represents the African American community's ability to come
together to overthrow the "ghost" of the past and to loosen the chokehold it has on their
lives. When she reappears in Jazz as the pregnant Wild, and in Paradise in a group of
40
unruly women (one ofwhom is also pregnant), Morrison reminds us that this work is
never entirely finished. After all, the past always gives birth to the future, and the issues
of one generation are inherited by the next. To the extent that it offers an alternative to
racist, patriarchal American history, Morrison's use of the gnostic tradition in Beloved,
Jazz, and Paradise enables a revision of hierarchical elements of the Judeo-Christian
tradition in a way that doesn't entirely discredit the role that tradition has played in
African American history. Although Morrison's explicit reference to the gnostic tradition
doesn't come until Jazz-and gains momentum in Paradise-her awareness of these
gnostic epistemologies is apparent as early as the first novel in the trilogy; as such, an
exploration of the first two novels with these concerns in mind offers a reading alive with
interpretive possibilities.
* * *
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and named in 2006 by the New
York Times as the best American novel written in the past twenty-five years, Beloved
inaugurates Morrison's trilogy and her revision of African American history continued in
Jazz and Paradise. The novel begins shortly before Emancipation and focuses broadly
on the psychological ramifications of slavery from the Middle Passage to the years
between the signing ofthe Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 until the ratification of the
Thirteenth Amendment less than two decades later. As in the other two novels in the
trilogy, and as anticipated through Morrison's critical work, Beloved is deeply invested in
exposing the "fishbowl" in formal practices of imaginative production. Like Jazz and
41
Paradise, the novel investigates the relationship between the violence of slavery and
the destructive logic of sacred texts embedded in seemingly innocuous narrative
techniques (often the result of misinterpretation and misuse rather than inherent
deficiencies in the sacred text itself). After all, the myth of regeneration through violence
that Richard Slotkin claims was central to early American identity formation is based on
the precedent of biblical apocalypse. In particular, Beloved scrutinizes the destructive
effects of apocalyptic narrative forms derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition and
interpreted as a justification for (indeed, expectation of) such violence as a vehicle for
social regeneration and narrative closure. Although the novel is replete with biblical
imagery and allusions, Beloved ultimately foreshadows the gnostic preoccupations of
both Jazz and Paradise through its revision of the biblical book of Revelation and by
incorporating an understanding of apocalypse that emphasizes salvation through
knowledge. The novel actually presents two apocalyptic moments---{)ne which clearly
alludes to the biblical Revelation of John and one which does not-and revises the first to
provide an alternative to biblical, violent, end-of-the-world narrative of closure.2 This
second option results in a more positive outcome for the novel's characters and
emphasizes the "self-knowledge" that is at the heart of gnostic belief. Likewise, this
revised apocalyptic narrative stresses the idea that "revelation" can offer hope for
revolutionary social change without its destructive counterpart; Beloved warns against
historical amnesia and encourages the gnosis that comes from revision and "rememory"
(226).3
The story of Beloved begins with a haunting: a baby ghost returns to enact
revenge on her mother, Sethe, who pulled a handsaw across the throat of her eighteen-
42
month-old daughter rather than have her returned to a life of slavery.4 The reason for
the baby's venom isn't disclosed until well over halfway into the novel, allowing
Morrison time to develop Sethe's own story in a way that helps to explain her "rough
choice" when the facts are finally revealed (212). Carried off in the sheriffs wagon with
her nose in the air, Sethe spends a year in a rat-infested prison cell with her youngest
daughter, Denver, and elicits the condemnation of the black community of Cincinnati,
Ohio, who disdain Sethe's haughty carriage after the event and, like many other
Christians, believe "pride goeth before a fall" (202, Proverbs 16: 18). In other words, the
women aren't upset about the baby's murder so much as the prideful attitude that
accompanies it. Their disapproval lasts for almost two decades, or until roughly nine
months after the return of the baby ghost in the flesh of a young woman who calls herself
"Beloved."
Although Beloved seems harmless at first, it is soon made clear that her presence
threatens Sethe's life. After Denver asks for help in her mother's stead, thirty women
from the community reconsider their earlier disapproval of Sethe and decide that enough
is enough-they reason, at last, in accordance with the biblical Gospels, that '''sufficient
unto the day is the evil thereof,' and nobody needed more" (302, Matthew 6: 34). Her
former friend, Ella, contends that while "she didn't mind a little communication between
the two worlds, [Beloved's presence] was an invasion" (302). Gathering at Sethe's house
to exorcise Beloved, the group of women "brought what they could and what they
believed would work. [Many] brought Christian faith-as shield and sword" against
what they considered a demonic presence (303, Ephesians 6: 11-17). What ultimately
works to eradicate Beloved, however, comes from an alternative tradition: "they stopped
43
praying and took a step back to the beginning. In the beginning there were no words.
In the beginning was the sound, and they all knew what the sound sounded like" (303).
Mimicking the biblical gospel of John, which begins with the well-known verse-"In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"-
Morrison indicates, however, that rather than looking to the biblical "Word of God," the
singing women in Beloved relied on another tradition, one where "in the beginning there
were no words" (303, John 1: 1). After all, the women "searched for the right
combination, the key, the code, the sound that broke the back ofwords" (308). The
women's reliance on "sound" instead of "words" revises a key moment in Frederick
Douglass' 1845 Narrative:
[The slaves] would compose and sing as they went along, consulting
neither time nor tune. The thought that came up, came out-ifnot in the
word, in the sound;--and as frequently in the one as in the other...they
would sing, as a chorus, to words which to many seem unmeaning jargon,
but which, nevertheless, were full ofmeaning to themselves. (36)
Morrison's revision of this moment in Beloved insists on the efficacy of sound over
words, the oral tradition over the written. In the novel, a sound that "breaks the back of
words" has power, and one the women discover has immediate results: Sethe "tremble[s]
like the baptized in its wash," and Beloved disappears into the woods (308, 315). It is no
coincidence that all thirty members of the group are women. Here, and throughout the
trilogy, Morrison reassigns important spiritual tasks to women, and especially black
women.
44
Not surprisingly, Beloved has remained in the critical spotlight since its
publication in 1987. Literally hundreds of books and articles have been published which
deal with this enigmatic text, and several critics in particular have focused on locating
and assessing biblical revisions in Beloved.5 Their work is instructive in understanding
how Morrison's use of the Bible functions within the larger context ofAfrican American
literary tradition and within the particular period of American history the novel recounts;
Susan Bowers, for example, locates Beloved in a long trajectory of African American
apocalyptic writing, while Carolyn Mitchell argues that "Christ's suffering [and the Bible
in general] informs the ways in which many African-Americans view their historical (and
present day) suffering" and insists that, in the novel, "Morrison is keenly aware of the
power ofthese views" (186). Without doubt, the work ofthese critics is helpful in
pointing out the sheer volume of biblical allusions and references in Beloved. When read
side by side, however, much of the criticism available on biblical revisions in the text
lacks a sense of agreement or coherence: one critic, for instance, views the escaped slave,
Sethe, as Christ-like in Beloved (Mitchell 176), while others claim Sethe's mother-in-law,
Baby Suggs, is the Christ figure (Morey 252, Taylor-Guthrie 126). Still another asserts
that Sethe's daughter, Denver, fills this role (Bowers 222).6 In my formulation, these
diverse interpretations each remain valid and can be understood to work concurrently, but
only when the novel's gnostic undercurrents are uncovered and explored. The use of the
gnostic poem, "Thunder, Perfect Mind" in Jazz and Paradise, especially, helps to
illustrate how Morrison uses the gnostic texts to replace hierarchical either/or
formulations with more inclusive methods to clarify how all three characters-Sethe,
Baby Suggs, and Denver-might each display Christ-like characteristics. No other
45
critical work has yet to explore the gnostic influence in Beloved, the recognition of
which changes key readings of the text.
Clearly, Beloved is heavily influenced by the Judeo-Christian tradition, yet that
relationship is complicated by the women's actions at the end of the novel, by Morrison's
revision of the gospel of John there, and by her additional revisions of both the Genesis
story and, of course, the book of Revelation. Morrison models biblical revisions
throughout Beloved but especially in the "creation story," the narrative which describes
Beloved's voyage across the across the ocean on a slave ship. In this passage, as
throughout the novel, it is clear that Beloved is representative of both Sethe's dead
daughter and the "sixty million and more," whose history Morrison is crafting. Morrison
models the passage, in part, on the text from John ("In the beginning" is repeated
throughout) but also on the Genesis story of creation that uses the same formulation: "In
the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1: 1). Morrison further
aligns Beloved with the Genesis story when she alludes to the passage of time: "there is
night and there is day again agam night day night day" (251, Genesis 1: 5).
Morrison's incorporation of Genesis, in particular, sets Beloved up as a creation story in
its own right-of African American history previously untold-and lays the groundwork
for the work the novel does to further revise the book ofRevelation and the violent
version of apocalypse it has been understood to sanction.
The vexed relationship Beloved maintains with the Judeo-Christian tradition-
illustrated in its complicated use of biblical allusions and imagery-is first exemplified in
the novel's epigraph, taken from the ninth chapter ofRomans: "I will call them my
people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved" (verse 25).
46
Paul, the author ofRomans, uses this verse to argue that God will show mercy not only
to the Jews, his "chosen people," but also the Gentiles: "In other words, it is not the
natural children who are God's children, but it is the children ofthe promise who are
regarded as Abraham's offspring" (9: 8).7 Paul supports his argument with a verse taken
from the book of Hosea, which uses an extended metaphor of adultery to illustrate
Israel's unfaithfulness to God. In Hosea, God tells the prophet Hosea to take as his wife
the prostitute Gomer-first to rebuke and punish her for her adulterous ways, then to
seduce her and speak tenderly to her, and ultimately to reconcile with her: "Go, show
your love to your wife again, though she is loved by another and is an adulteress. Love
her as the Lord loves the Israelites, though they turn to other gods" (3: 1). The
metaphorical language works to illustrate God's relationship with the Israelites; thus,
Gomer (a symbol of Israel), in her unfaithfulness to her husband, Hosea (representative
of God), has adulterated herself with other men (symbols of the other gods Israel has
"adulterated" itself with in its unfaithfulness to God). Yet God will call "her beloved,
which is not beloved." In His mercy, God will forgive the Israelites for their wicked
ways, and they will in turn prosper and "be like the sand on the seashore, which cannot
be measured or counted" (l: 10).
In Beloved, the epigraph functions by calling attention to the ways the novel itself
serves as a metaphor for African American history in general and to the history of slavery
and its aftermath in particular. Beloved, the ghost returned to enact revenge on her
mother, is representative of the novel's dedication to "sixty million and more," the
number of Africans estimated to have died in the Middle Passage before ever reaching
the "New World" (Taylor-Guthrie 120). In the text, Beloved is the embodiment, not only
47
of the one, "crawling already? girl" with her throat cut, but also of the millions of
Africans and African Americans who "died bad" in the institution of American slavery
(221). As Denver asserts about Beloved: "at times I think she was-more [than the ghost
of her sister]" (314). Beloved's actions, then, can likewise be read metaphorically; thus,
her haunting of Sethe is representative of the haunting of African Americans by the dead
and by the past they symbolize. The women's exorcism and Beloved's disappearance at
the end of the novel represent the African American community's acknowledgment of the
past, their attempts to suppress its negative control over their lives, and their ability
ultimately to overcome it. Naming "her beloved; which was not beloved" is Morrison's
metaphor for this type of recovery and her call for African Americans to come to terms
with slavery and its haunting legacy.8
While the Hosea passage helps to illustrate Morrison's use of metaphor in
Beloved, Paul's revision of Hosea calls attention to the formal qualities of scriptural
revision and to Morrison's own revision of Romans and other crucial biblical passages.9
Whereas Morrison could have quoted the text directly from Hosea, she chose the Romans
passage instead (195).10 In doing so, she calls attention to the way history, and especially
sacred history and the texts that recount it, is revised and shaped by those who narrate it.
After all, Paul's revision ofHosea radically changes the text's original meaning.
Ultimately, Morrison contends, the way a story is told shapes history as it is being told;
"narrative has never been merely entertainment for me. It is, I believe, one of the
principle ways in which we absorb knowledge" (Nobel Lecture 14, 7). Her inclusion of
the Romans passage as the novel's epigraph thus highlights the urgency for a revision of
--------------_._---
48
harmful elements of sacred texts embedded in social and cultural practice at the same
time as it gives agency to the narrative process itself as a means toward that end.
By focusing in particular on the idea of apocalypse in Beloved, Morrison calls
attention to the way such imagery functions to normalize historical attempts at violent
regeneration and how narrative can formulate models to overcome it. The final book of
the Christian New Testament offers an end-of-the-world "revelation" and tells in detail of
the battle of Armageddon that will end the age of mankind and restore peace in heaven
(that is, it predicts the final battle between God and His forces of righteousness and
Satan). In other words, in the biblical formulation (as it has been imaged by countless
American narratives) violent bloodshed is a prerequisite for eternal peace. More, the
Bible has been used to sanction violence toward slaves specifically: Exodus 21: 20-21
declares that it is permissible to beat a slave to near death (but not to kill him) since the
slave is the property of his owner. Many of the early colonists and slaveholders were
Christians who knew and followed these biblical regulations-recall in particular Davis'
(President of the Confederate States of America) assertion that slavery "was established
by decree of Almighty God" (Rowland 286). In Beloved, Schoolteacher and his pupils
are also Christians, "the kind who know Jesus by His first name, but out of politeness
never use it even to His face" at the same time as they are capable of rationalizing Sethe
and the other slaves at Sweet Home as only part human, and as "creatures [... ] who
needed every care and guidance in the world" (44, 176-7). Morrison challenges this logic
of violent regeneration by showing its harmful potential; although it never condemns
Sethe for her actions, Beloved draws parallels between Sethe's violence and the
institution she rebels against. In other words, the violence of slavery continues in her act.
49
Such violence is avoided at the end of the novel through a revision of scriptural
narrative motivating both cultural practice and imaginative production. As such,
Morrison provides Sethe's with an alternative course of action at the same time as she
connects narrative revision and social change. In doing so, she comments on U. S.
society as a whole and posits alternatives to the destructive impulse of historical
"apocalypse."
Beloved's treatment of the imagery of apocalypse remains a salient feature of the
novel and a central part of the work it does to provide alternatives to the logic of slavery.
The most significant way the novel does this is by repeating and revising Sethe's
particular moment of apocalypse at the novel's end and giving her the opportunity for
self-revelation, or salvation through knowledge, that is central to the gnostic tradition.
When Schoolteacher, his nephew, a slave catcher, and the sheriff-"the four
horsemen"-ride into the yard at 124 to claim Sethe and her children, the reference to the
four riders of the biblical apocalypse is clear (174). When Sethe flees to the woodshed to
kill her children, Morrison further aligns the narrative with its biblical counterpart by
calling forth images of the bloodshed of Armageddon. The text itself maintains a circular
narrative pattern, which mercilessly advances and retreats and doesn't finally reveal
Sethe's offense until over halfway through the novel. ll In "Beloved and the New
Apocalypse," literary critic Susan Bowers emphasizes these formal qualities and insists
that the "unveiling" at the etymological root ofthe word "apocalypse" calls attention to
the novel's real revelation about the tragedy offorgetting:
Morrison fuses Christian notions of apocalypse with West African beliefs
to create a revised apocalyptic that principally looks backward, not
50
forward in time, and concentrates on the psychological devastation which
[occurred] when African Americans [...] let the horrors of the Middle
Passage and slavery disappear into the black hole of Lethe, that vortex of
forgetting. (210-11)
Although several critics have made the connection between the novel's protagonist,
Sethe, and Lethe, the river of forgetfulness that flows through Hades in Greek mythology,
Bowers additionally argues that the traumatic, violent narrative is itself a kind of "new
[literary] apocalypse" that "unveils" the forgetfulness of history rather than concludes it.
She maintains that, unlike the biblical model, "the novel does not drive toward its
apocalyptic moment but recounts the struggle of living through and beyond the reign of
the Anti-Christ and of surviving the 'mumbling of the black and angry dead' (210,211).
Apocalypse thus becomes, not a synonym for chaos and cataclysm, but a revelation with
the potential to serve as a catalyst for personal and historical growth.
As Lois Parkinson Zamora reminds us in Writing the Apocalypse, apocalypses
had been well established as a literary form by about the second century B.C.E.; the genre
has since become intimately tied to mainstream American cultural mythology and to
literary production by both canonical and non-canonical American writers (1). In its
original formulation (and according to Zamora, who is speaking from the standpoint of
modem literary apocalypse), apocalypse is a mode of writing where "the end ofthe world
is described from the point ofview of a narrator who is radically opposed to existing
spiritual and political practices"; in addition, the "narrative reflects not only his
opposition to [these] practices but also his political powerlessness to change them. His is
a subversive vision: He is outside the cultural and political mainstream [...] awaiting
51
God's intervention in human history" (2). In part because ofthe flexibility of
interpretation allowed by the form, it has appealed to a variety of people in many
historical moments (11). Zamora further argues: "in the historical development of
apocalyptic thought one sees the direct relation of the myth of apocalypse to its
sociological and political context" (11). Finally, she contends "the resurgence of
apocalyptic modes of thought and expression is a predictable reaction to social disruption
and temporal uncertainty, and explains in part its currency in our own popular
vocabulary" (11). Not surprisingly, themes and narratives of apocalypse have been
highlighted by American writers from diverse eras and backgrounds; in particular, the
genre has had a long-standing and prevailing influence on African American literary
production, although critics have been quick to point out essential differences between
writers of apocalypse from disenfranchised groups and those from the mainstream.
Susan Bowers, for example, contends that "African American apocalypse must be
clearly differentiated from White American apocalypse," and she insists that each has its
own defining characteristics. White American apocalypse, for example, "has been based
on the optimistic expectation of historical, material change. The reverse experience [...]
is true for African Americans" since "they did not leave an Old World of death and
decadence for a New World of hope and rebirth but were tom from the world of their
families, to be taken to a world of suffering, death, and alienation" (211). While I agree
with Bowers that there are significant differences between the two traditions, I don't
agree that African American apocalypse necessarily excludes the hope for revolutionary
change: on the contrary, this chapter argues that Morrison's revision of the central
narrative of apocalypse in Beloved favors the revision of limiting and destructive myths
52
as a means to bring about both historical and material change. Ultimately, Sethe's
narrative has the potential to foster both; the main difference is that the novel considers
personal, psychological growth and renewal as a prerequisite to historical revolution.
Likewise, it resists the temptation to treat violence and tribulation as the primary catalyst
for that change. In general, however, apocalypse in the modem literary tradition often
envisions cataclysmic or violent upheaval as a prerequisite to revolutionary change and
the ushering in of a "new world order" that restores balance and power to the
dispossessed.
The specific narrative of apocalypse derived from the biblical book of Revelation,
however, is not without its limitations, and historically, some writers have invoked the
form as a way to modify or reject it (3). After all, John Leddy Phelan's The Millennial
Kingdom ofthe Franciscans in the New World establishes that a messianic worldview
informed the colonization of the "New World" and motivated Puritan belief in America
as the site of "a new heaven and a new earth" (Revelation 21: 1). Zamora further
contends:
apocalyptic optimism pervaded the Age ofDiscovery [...J. Explorers,
statesmen, and clergy alike viewed the events of geographical exploration
and colonization of America as the fulfillment of the prophecies of
Revelation-that is, as necessary prerequisites to the end of the world. (8)
Interactions with Native Americans, in particular, took on an added significance-since
they were believed by many to be the lost tribes of Israel described in Revelation and
predicted to reappear before the Last Judgment: "so the conquest of the Aztec empire
immediately began to accrue levels of apocalyptic significance" (8).12 Writers from
53
disenfranchised groups, resisting the historical consequences ofapocalypse, have
revised and reframed the narrative to turn the form on itself; many rewrite the traditional
battle between "good" and "evil," for example, and redefine the key players in the
encounter as a way to contest such historical processes. In Beloved, Morrison appears to
focus on the etymological meaning of the word "apocalypse" at the same time as she
resists the traditional form that sees violence as a prerequisite to social change or waits
for the final intervention of a supernatural being to counter historical injustice. In
Beloved, Morrison thus favors Zamora's contention that "apocalypse is not merely a
synonym for disaster or cataclysm or chaos. It is, in fact, a synonym for 'revelation'"
(10). To understand "apocalypse" as "revelation," then, is to separate it from its violent
signification.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the idea of apocalypse as a "revelation," featured so
prominently in Beloved, has links to gnostic scripture; no fewer than seven books of
apocalypse are recorded in the Nag Hammadi discoveries alone and six more texts are
defined by the editors of The Nag Hammadi Library as "revelation dialogue" or
"revelation discourse."l3 (Perhaps most interesting among those listed as revelation
discourse is "The Thunder, Perfect Mind," parts of which appear as Morrison's epigraphs
in both Jazz and Paradise.) Again, apocalyptic literature dates back to the first two
centuries preceding the birth of Christ: in other words, to exactly the same time as when
these gnostic texts were in circulation. They are thus exemplary and original models of
the genre. Rather than end-of-the-world narratives ofjudgment, of which there are
surprisingly few, these texts treat "apocalypse" primarily as a moment of revelation and
redemption and are widely varied in form and content. The book ofRevelation is not the
54
only Christian apocalyptic text, either: according to Zamora, the thirteenth chapter of
Mark, the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, and the Second Epistle of Peter are also
considered apocalyptic; in the canonic Hebrew Bible, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Zechariah
spring from this literary genre as well (2). The Revelation of John, however, remains "by
many judgments the most complete and the finest of traditional apocalyptic texts," and it
is certainly the best known in contemporary popular culture; "it is, in short, a text which
has directly or indirectly engendered and enriched [countless] other texts" (1-2). The
prevalence of a well-established literary genre of apocalypse in the gnostic tradition (as
well as in the Jewish and early Christian traditions, among others) serves as a reminder
that the Revelation narrative is only one of many such accounts and that too strict a
reading of Beloved with St. John's text in mind is to miss crucial elements of the novel.
When understood in this broad way-as an "unveiling" or a "revelation"-it is clear
there are many such moments of apocalypse in Beloved and that they differ greatly from
the model offered in the book ofRevelation. Nearly all the novel's major characters-
Sethe, Denver, and Paul D, especially---encounter small moments ofrevelation
throughout Beloved that change their outlook on and approach to life. Denver realizes
the destructiveness of Beloved and Sethe's love for one another, and it prompts her to
seek help where formerly she was terrified to venture. The rusted tin box that contains
Paul D's heart begins to open. And, most importantly, Sethe discovers her "best thing" at
the novel's end: "Me? Me?" (322). This final emphasis on self-knowledge is a central
feature of the gnostic poem, "Thunder, Perfect Mind," that appears in the epigraphs to
both Jazz and Paradise.
55
After all, unlike the biblical apocalypse, Sethe's violence is not regenerative,
nor does it usher in renewal or closure for the problems of her particular moment in
American history. If, as in the biblical model, forces of good and evil are at work in
Beloved, the lines between them are constantly blurred: like Baby Suggs, the text never
ultimately "approve[s] or condemn[s] Sethe's rough choice" (212).14 The central
apocalyptic narrative in Beloved is significant, however, especially because it is repeated
twice; and, despite its apparent differences from the biblical apocalypse recounted in
Revelation, the first account maintains important parallels (described above) while the
second version departs considerably. These variations help to destabilize the authority of
a singular, biblical narrative at the same time as they open the door to alternative (and in
Sethe's case, more effective) epistemological frameworks. Since the outcome of Sethe's
filicide-the central apocalyptic narrative in Beloved-is the death of Beloved, the defeat
of Baby Suggs, the disappearance of Sethe's sons, Howard and Buglar, the dissolution of
her entire support system, and a sense of guilt that haunts her for nearly two decades, it is
clear that the negative repercussions ofSethe's actions greatly outweigh the positive.
Figuratively, then, the biblical narrative they coincide with-and which Morrison
emphasizes through imagery of bloodshed and the four horsemen, etc.-----can also be read
as destructive and in need of revision.
By contrast, when the apocalyptic narrative is repeated at the novel's end, it has
been revised so fully that all it retains from the biblical account is an emphasis on
redemption. In particular, it offers Sethe the possibility to redeem herself from her
earlier, destructive actions, even if at first it appears she's merely repeating them: just
after the arrival of the thirty townswomen and the commencement of the singing that
56
"broke the back of words," Edward Bodwin, the white abolitionist who owned 124,
drove a cart down Bluestone Road and into the yard to pick Denver up for work.
Reminiscing about the childhood he spent there and thinking about the box of tin soldiers
he buried somewhere in the yard, he hardly notices Sethe coming at him with an ice pick.
Sethe, mistaking Bodwin for Schoolteacher returned once more to take away what she
considers her "best thing[s]," her children, "hears wings. Little hummingbirds stick
needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings. And if she
thinks anything, it is no. No no. Nonono. She flies" (308-09). During the novel's
central moment of apocalypse, when Schoolteacher and his men first come into the yard
at 124 and Sethe heads to the woodshed to kill her children, the text is nearly-though
not exactly-identical to this revised apocalyptic moment at the novel's end:
[Sethe] was squatting in the garden and when she saw them coming and
recognized schoolteacher's hat, she heard wings. Little hummingbirds
stuck their needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat
their wings. And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono.
[...] She just flew. (192)
These formal variations help to emphasize the one, major difference between the two
accounts: that the object and outcome of Sethe's violence has radically changed. This
-
time, rather than kill her children, Sethe revises her earlier actions and lunges at Bodwin
instead. The difference is significant. Even though Bodwin at first appears harmless, he
represents Schoolteacher by virtue of his relationship to the central narrative of Sethe's
filicide and his parallel role in its revision. More importantly, he represents the insidious
nature of white American racism-figured best in the novel by the coin dish in his living
57
room, which was "a blackboy's mouth full of money. His head was thrown back
farther than a head could go [ ]. Bulging like moons, two eyes were all the face he had
above the gaping red mouth. [ ] Painted across the pedestal he knelt on were the words
"At Yo Service" (300). Thus, when Sethe lunges at Bodwin rather than kill Beloved, her
actions can be read as Sethe "lash[ing] out" at the institutions of white racism rather than
destroying those closest to her. Interestingly, here the narrative departs from the biblical
account of apocalypse almost entirely; rather than the four riders who appeared in the
earlier narrative, this time there is only one. IS Moreover, Denver stops Sethe before she
can kill Bodwin, thus avoiding the bloodshed associated with the biblical apocalypse
(313).16 By revising this apocalyptic narrative and presenting it twice in Beloved,
Morrison gives Sethe the opportunity to expiate her earlier actions (and thus highlights
the possibility for personal and historical change) at the same time as she emphasizes the
revelatory qualities of "apocalypse" over the biblical, violent, end-of-the-world narrative
of closure.
In both cases, the result is similar-Beloved dies or disappears-but the process
itself has altered and the overall outcome improves. Since Beloved represents the
"ghost" of slavery and its aftermath, the goal is not her total eradication but a lessoning of
the control she maintains over the present, and the novel's emphasis on her
disappearance, as opposed to her death, illustrates this difference. This revision brings
the African American community together rather than alienating them from each other,
and it emphasizes women's special capacity to engender significant social change-as
symbolized by the thirty singers gathered in Sethe's yard who are all female. When these
women appear at the end of Beloved and Morrison revises the Gospel of John to argue
58
that "In the beginning was the sound," she poses an alternative that predates
Christianity but is still informed by it. This helps to explain the fact that when Stamp
Paid hears "sounds" surrounding 124, he knows they are "older, but not stronger than He
Himself was" (202). Since the sounds are linked to Beloved's presence in the house, and
since we know from the epigraph that Beloved represents the "sixty million and more"
Africans who died in the Middle Passage, we know that the "sounds" represent the
general "haunting" of African Americans by a history, as Susan Bowers has insisted, that
has been suppressed and must be "unveiled." Of course, the debate between "word" and
"sound" alludes first of all to the tension of representing an older, African American oral
tradition in the written, as figured in many of the slave narratives of the era Beloved
recounts.17 In the context of Stamp Paid's comment, however, the "sounds" may also
represent yet another "history" in need of recovery: that of the suppression of sacred texts
by those with political power and, in particular, the suppression of gnostic texts by the
early Christian church. Thus, the gnostic texts are "older" than the Church, "but not
stronger," since they did not survive censorship in the first few centuries C.E. The
women's emphasis on sound again asserts that this tradition is older than Christianity ("In
the beginning there were no words. In the beginning was the sound"), can have powerful
effects (the women generate "a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and
knock the pods off chestnut trees"), and yet still retain a connection to the Christian
tradition ("it broke over Sethe and she trembled like the baptized in its wash") (308).18
Although this connection between "sound" and the gnostic tradition is never finally made
explicit in Beloved, the novel's gnostic revision of apocalypse as "revelation" and the
openly gnostic concerns of both Jazz and Paradise (in fact, the epigraph in Jazz takes up
59
the issue of "sound" in a specifically gnostic context) all indicate that, even in this first
book of the trilogy, Morrison is developing alternatives to destructive theistic language
and formal practices inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition and embedded in
literary practices. This alternative is facilitated, at least in part, through an understanding
of gnostic theology.
Most important, Morrison's inclusion of this theology offers Sethe the
opportunity for personal growth and self-revelation central to the gnostic tradition
featured so prominently in both Jazz and Paradise. The most significant revision
Morrison makes to the apocalyptic narrative in Beloved is in Sethe's moment of self-
revelation at the novel's end, since it is here she emphasizes the "unveiling" that is at the
etymological root of apocalypse. Following the gathering of the women in Sethe's yard,
Bodwin's dramatic entry, and Beloved's disappearance, Sethe falls into a state of
depression akin to Baby Suggs' social withdrawal in the few years after the death of
Beloved. Blaming herself for the violence and bloodshed that occurred in her yard,
Sethe's mother-in-law had given up on life, returned to an infantile state where she only
noticed colors, and slowly passed away. Here, Morrison revises Baby's earlier surrender
through Sethe and by drawing a parallel: both retreat under Baby's colorful, patchwork
quilt. Morrison's choice of Baby Suggs here is important, since Baby serves as an
"unchurched preacher" throughout the novel, "uncalled" to preach to all denominations
the gospel of self-love: "in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that
dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard" (102, 103). "Yonder," she tells
them, "they do not love your flesh. [...] You got to love it, you!" (104). (This idea arises
again in the sermon Paul D gives Sethe at the end ofthe novel.) But Baby Suggs gives
60
up and admits defeat after Schoolteacher comes into her yard and Sethe kills her
daughter: "the heart that pumped out love, the mouth that spoke the Word, didn't count.
They came in her yard anyway" (212).
The Word, of course, represents the biblical Word of God and the Christian
tradition Baby Suggs preaches from; she is linked to that tradition throughout the novel
through imagery of Christ feeding the masses and by calling the children in the Clearing:
"let the children come" (160-61, 103, Mark 6: 32-42, Matthew 19: 14).19 Although Baby
Suggs revises the tradition somewhat-she is, after all, "unchurched," "uncalled," and
"[does] not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more"-she ultimately
realizes that that tradition is controlled by others who have the power to take it away on a
whim (l03, John 8: 11). When Stamp Paid argues with Baby Suggs after she gives up
("you can't quit the Word. It's given you to speak. You can't quit the Word, I don't care
what all happen to you"), Baby responds by saying, "that's one other thing they took
away from me" (210, 209). What she means, and what the text ultimately argues, is that
a sacred text loses its authority when it fails to speak to the experiences of those who rely
on it for guidance. And if ''they'' have the power to come into Baby's yard and "take
away" the Word (that is, to make her doubt her own beliefs), then they control even her
spirituality. Paul D puts it another way: "Did a whiteman saying it make it so?" (260).
Baby Suggs ultimately gives up the Word and admits defeat under her colorful patchwork
quilt: "God puzzled her and she was too ashamed ofHim to say so" (208). There is a
sense of urgency surrounding the details ofBaby's death: to revise those sacred texts that
can no longer sustain their adherents and to consider other perspectives and texts that
offer viable solutions (as well as comfort) in the face of lived history.
61
The singing women who initiate this revised apocalyptic narrative in Beloved,
the "sound [they generate] that broke the back of words" and, consequently, the baptism
it engenders, put Sethe in the position to carryon Baby Sugg's spiritual legacy-with a
few key revisions. In both the Judeo-Christian and gnostic traditions, Seth is the son born
to Adam and Eve to replace Abel after he is slain by Cain. The New Testament figures
Seth in the genealogy of Jesus Christ; in the gnostic tradition, Seth is the recipient of a
saving knowledge, or gnosis, transmitted to him by Adam. Sethian Gnostics (a division
of Egyptian Gnosticism) understood themselves as inheritors of a true spirituality and as
members of "the living and unshakable race" (Robinson 396). In Beloved, Sethe serves
as a representative of this tradition, so, unlike Baby Suggs (whom she replaces after Baby
is "killed" by a failure of the Word to sustain her), Sethe's depression and her retreat
under the patchwork quilt does not lead to her death. Instead, Morrison revises Baby's
character and presents Sethe with the opportunity for gnostic self-revelation: when Paul
D comes to see her, he repeats a version of Baby's sermon of self-love-a variant of
gnosis, or self-knowledge, and a central concept in gnostic thought. When Sethe tells
him that Beloved was her "best thing," and now she's gone, Paul D counters: "You your
best thing, Sethe. You are" (322). Sethe's response-"Me? Me?"-illustrates this
moment of gnostic self-revelation at the same time as it opens up the possibility for a
continuation of Sethe's story instead of its conclusion. The Judeo-Christian apocalyptic
narrative of closure, which offers Sethe no future, is therefore revised and replaced by a
gnostic narrative of "revelation" and redemption, which does.
In fact, at no point is Sethe's story actually finished; on the contrary, Beloved
emphasizes beginnings over a narrative ofclosure and finality. The novel's
62
"apocalyptic" ending thus reveals the potential for scriptural revision to engender
significant personal change and to alter history itself through the creation of new
beginnings and new narratives that carryover into the other novels of the trilogy.
Ultimately, "creating" African American history in this way gives agency to the narrative
process itself and reclaims a spiritual heritage that has been distorted, suppressed, and
denied. By revising the biblical account of apocalypse and other central biblical
passages, Morrison tells African American history in a way that both envisions a viable
future and proposes the means to its attainment. Paul D tells Sethe, "me and you, we got
more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow" (322). Although on the
literal level he's talking only about the two of them, the novel's emphasis on
metaphorical meaning makes it clear that Morrison intends Paul's comment for a much
broader community as well. What that community will do with the challenge is a theme
further explored in Jazz.
* * *
Toni Morrison's Jazz begins with the sound of a needle being placed on a record:
"Sth." This simple sound, and the image that accompanies it, sets in motion the driving
metaphor of the entire novel. Throughout Jazz, Morrison explores her unnamed
narrator's initial concern "that the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat
itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle" (220). In
Jazz Morrison is concerned with a different cultural epoch in African American history
from that in Beloved; rather than the Reconstruction Era, Jazz is set during the Harlem
63
Renaissance. However, Morrison structures Jazz, like Beloved, around a metaphor
regarding the nature ofhistorical narration and explores the relationship between sacred,
political, and literary history. Strengthened through continuous references to music, jazz
clubs, and Bluebird records, the metaphor of the needle in the groove illustrates the
cyclical nature of history and its potentially endless repetition?O Morrison similarly
employs gnostic texts to argue that a revision of the myths and cultural practices that
motivate history is essential to an avoidance of further violence and repetition. In Jazz,
however, the narrative revolves around a different formal concern; unlike Beloved, which
investigated the ways a biblical model of apocalypse often drives the need for violent
regeneration and narrative closure in American literature, Jazz is concerned with the
problem of omniscient narration and its relationship to an omniscient (Judeo-Christian)
God?l In part through its use of gnostic texts and themes, the novel posits an alternative
to the destructive logic embedded in conventional narrative modes at the same time as it
makes historical revision a participatory process by leveling hierarchical distinctions
between author and audience.
Ultimately, the story ofJazz serves to disprove the metaphor of the needle stuck
in the groove of history by providing alternative possibilities and outcomes for the
novel's characters; the voice narrating the text gives an account of African American
history in which she herselfplays an important role. In fact, the techniques and
limitations of narrative form are of central concern in Jazz, and its setting-the Harlem
Renaissance-provides an important context for the ideas of narrative voice presented in
the novel. After all, the Harlem Renaissance was a period of black literary production
when the problem of voice was particularly at the fore of African American cultural
64
production; in The Signifying Monkey, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. argues that during this
period "the search for a voice in black letters became a matter of grave concern among
the black literati" (171). Morrison's retelling of this era of African American history thus
takes up the concerns pertinent to the period, but she recounts them in a way that
responds to what she sees as their limitations; Morrison thus locates herself in the
tradition at the same time as she scrutinizes its practices. Through a self-reflexive
commentary on the art of narrative technique and authorship, Morrison challenges the
roots of accepted narrative modes in African American literary production and calls for a
revision of their adverse qualities, often connected to theistic language inherited from the
Judeo-Christian tradition that is nonetheless a vital part of the African American
experience?2 Patricia Hunt, in "'Free to do something wild': History and the Ancestor in
Jazz," has noted the "god-like Voice that narrates Jazz" and argues that it "is reminiscent
of God in the Pentateuch" (49). Her contention that "Morrison's creation of the Voice
(the narrator) plays with the notion of the 'omniscient narrator' in fiction, which is often
related to the idea of God or a 'God's eye view'" is appropriate (49, parentheses mine)?3
A revision of the omniscient narrator, the novel ultimately contends, is the first step in
avoiding the destructive repetition of the needle stuck endlessly in the groove of history.
Other critics have likewise noted Morrison's emphasis on form. In "From the
'Other' Sides of the Realist Tracks: (A)gnostic Narratives in Toni Morrison's Jazz,"
Vincent O'Keefe argues that "the effect of Morrison's text on the reader is resistance to,
if not rejection of, traditional realist narrative of closure and rational certainty in favor of
less oppressive, more revisionary narrative techniques" (331 ).24 As the title of his article
suggests, however, and despite the fact that O'Keefe is one of few critics even to
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65
acknowledge the novel's gnostic undercurrents, he finally settles on an agnostic
reading of the text, arguing that tensions between Western, gnostic, African American,
and feminist traditions "escalate in the context of the narrator's growing epistemology of
agnosticism" and that Morrison "ultimately rejects the possibility of any type of track-
making because of the nonrepresentational nature of history and reality" (331).
O'Keefe's observations about the novel's gnostic tendencies are germane, but while the
narrator does finally admit her own lack of understanding, Jazz doesn't ultimately
succumb to an agnostic "unknowing" in the face of the nonrepresentationa1.25 On the
contrary, while the narrator is ultimately exposed as unreliable, Jazz transfers the power
(knowledge, gnosis) to the readers themselves in much the same way as gnostic scripture
often saw Christ (or the Savior) as not the end in itself, but as a means to an end-that of
the self obtaining its own knowledge and divinity (Pagels 126-34)?6 In this formulation,
the novel serves as only a model, and an openly imperfect one at that.27 This is a
strategic move on Morrison's part, since it deviates from the idea of literary production as
a vehicle for personal or historical salvation and the author as the bearer of that
deliverance. Instead, the novel becomes, not a definitive account of African American
social and literary history, but an account of its possibilities-it serves only as a guide.
O'Keefe is correct in assuming that to do otherwise would be an impossibility given "the
nonrepresentational nature of [...] reality," yet my own work with Jazz helps to
illuminate how Morrison's inclusion of the gnostic texts articulates an alternative which
allows the novel to retain both its authority and a sense of its continuing role in the
process of ongoing historical revision.
66
Jazz takes up the story of Violet and Joe Trace, a childless, middle-aged couple
who live in Harlem in the cultural heyday of the 1920s and who drift apart until events
transpire that make them unable to ignore each other's presence. After Joe kills his
eighteen year-old lover, Dorcas, and Violet turns up at her funeral to slash her dead
rival's face, both must accept the reality of their bleak situation and either change, persist
in it, or kill one another. What happens next is a surprise even to the narrator, whose own
confusion about the novel's central plot marks her as somewhat unreliable: "I missed it
altogether. 1 was sure one would kill the other. 1waited for it so 1 could describe it. 1
was so sure it would happen" (220). What the narrator "misse[s]," and what the
characters discover without her help, is that they author their own story and that history,
therefore, isn't destined to repeat itself. After Dorcas's death, a visit to the Traces by her
best friend Felice sets the narrative wheels in motion for a repeat of the novel's earlier
violence and fatality; after all, the novel presents Felice as "another true-as-life Dorcas,
four marcelled waves and all" (197).28 The narrator admits that "[she] saw the three of
them, Felice, Joe and Violet, and they looked to [her] like a mirror image of Dorcas, Joe
and Violet. [She] believed [she] saw everything important they did, and based on what
[she] saw [she] could imagine what [she] didn't" (221). What the narrator predicts as a
repeat of the fatal threesome, however, the characters counter with an unusual friendship,
one that leads to a renewal of affection between Joe and Violet and supplies them with
the child lacking in their own relationship. Thus, rather than falling into the rut (or
"groove") of their past mistakes, Joe, Violet, and Felice surprise the narrator with a story
she is unable even to imagine.
67
Although Joe and Violet's actions are independent of the narrator's
understanding of them, she nonetheless has the power to tell their story in whatever way
she prefers. Therein lies the problem with omniscient narration and its implications for
history and cultural production. For if omniscient narration allows a privileged, godlike
authority and favors a single perspective, usually that of the majority, then it does so at
the expense of all other perspectives. Derivative of the Judeo-Christian tradition in
American literature, omniscient narration carries with it a sense of fate: the story is
destined to happen in exactly the way the narrator describes, a perspective encouraged by
Paul's discussion of the doctrine of predestination in the book of Romans and called
attention to in Beloved's epigraph. The "God's eye view" of omniscient narration
announces itself as truth-the only possible way of telling a story-and is an example of
the theistic language Morrison hopes to eradicate (related to sexist and racist language
and practices because of its similarly hierarchical logic). In Jazz, Morrison counters an
omniscient narrative style by retelling central elements of the Trace's story from different
perspectives and with different outcomes and by introducing an increasingly self-
conscious narrator as the novel progresses.
Like Beloved, then, Jazz presents a central narrative moment and repeats it with a
difference. The primary narrative presents the triangle of Joe, Violet, and Dorcas, with
fatal results; the revision of this narrative (Joe, Violet, and Felice) ends not in death but in
reconciliation, affection, and friendship. Such a repetition illustrates how, by
manipulating narrative form, the outcome ofthe story can be radically changed. In doing
so, Morrison refutes the narrator's contention that history inevitably functions like the
needle stuck in the record groove at the same time as she engages concerns surrounding
68
the issue of narrative voice pertinent to the period. The tradition she follows stems
largely from debates between Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison,
debates Gates has argued existed during this period surrounding the nature and function
of representation, the ideology of mimesis (179). In his formulation:
Hurston, Wright, and Ellison's divergent theories of narrative structure
and voice, the cardinal points in a triangle of influence, with their
attendant ramifications upon the ideology of form and its relation to
knowledge and power, comprise a matrix of issues to which subsequent
black fictions, by definition, must respond. (184)
According to Gates, a "fiction of obliteration" (that is, narrative that writes into being an
individual at the expense ofthe community) created a "great divide in black literature" in
this period, a fissure surrounding the ethics ofmimesis and taken up by Hurston and
Wright especially; Gates argues that "no two authors in the tradition are more dissimilar"
in their views regarding narrative voice (182, 183). According to Gates, Wright in
particular considered himself "among those few Negroes who could tell not only their
own story but also the woeful tale of their pathetic, voiceless black countrymen" (182).
This idea stems from his belief, as Gates refers to it, in "an ironic relationship between
the individual black talent and an Afro-American cultural tradition ravaged and laid
waste to by an omnipresent and irresistible white racism" (181). In other words, the
"voiceless" African American community needed Wright, the voice of "black talent," to
tell their story. Wright follows the tradition ofDu Bois, who argued in "The Talented
Tenth" that "the Negro race [...] will be saved by its exceptional men" and that "the
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69
problem [of education is] of developing the Best of this race that they may guide the
Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst" (33).
Jazz picks up this historical debate; the novel, however, appears to align itself
with Ellison and Hurston in its refusal to uphold hierarchical language that positions the
author as responsible for (indeed, capable of ensuring) the "salvation" of his fellow
"men" at the expense of the rest of the African American community, who are at the very
least reduced to stereotypes and caricatures, if not denied agency altogether.29 The
narrator in this formulation serves as a figure for the author-responsible for the
representation of her characters-and those characters figure as members of the black
community in general. Of course, Morrison here exposes the limitations of this familiar
metaphor, one inherited from sacred texts: that of the author as "creator." In doing so,
she comes up against questions regarding the nature of creation and its potential
ramifications-the power a work of imaginative production exerts and over whom.
Conventional (omniscient) narrative forms, inherited from Judeo-Christian beliefs in the
American tradition, position the creator/author as omnipresent and infallible, but in Jazz,
Morrison destabilizes the logic of this position by foregrounding the author's fallibility
through the figure of the narrator. In fact, Jazz challenges the omniscient narrator
especially by employing a narrator who eventually loses all power of representation to
the authority of her characters. As the narrator acknowledges near the end ofJazz,
"[they] were [...] busy being original, complicated, changeable-human, I guess you'd
say, while I was the predictable one, confused in my solitude into arrogance, thinking my
space, my view was the only one that was or that mattered" (220). Ultimately,
Morrison's contribution to the Hurston-Wright-Ellison "triangle of influence" is to assign
70
the power of self-representation, for the first time, to the characters who serve as
figures of the community.30
Ultimately, the narrator's error is in overlooking these characters-she assumes
she is "invisible," when in reality she is predictable and does more harm than good to the
people whose history she recounts; she denies them agency by assuming their responses
predetermined and their lives fated (220). The word "invisible," in particular, begs a
comparison between the narrators of Morrison's Jazz and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man,
both of which live in or near Harlem in the 1920s. Ellison's narrator claims he is
"invisible [...] simply because people refuse to see [him]" (3). By contrast, the narrator
ofJazz believes she is invisible but is actually observed by the entire Harlem community
(220). Ellison's Invisible Man insists he is "a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber
and liquids-and [...] might even be said to possess a mind" (3). The narrator ofJazz,
however, specifically points out that she is a disembodied narrator who "[hasn't] got any
muscles" (8). At another moment, though, the narrator ofJazz continues in a voice that
might as well come from the pages of Invisible Man, the similarities are so great: "I lived
a long time, maybe too much, in my own mind. People say I should come out more.
Mix. I agree that I close off in places" (9). By going to the trouble of highlighting such
clear similarities and contrasts between the narrator ofJazz and Ellison's Invisible Man,
Morrison may be distinguishing between two different projects, both dealing with types
of invisibility-the invisibility of an African American man in the United States (and the
need to write himself into being), on the one hand, and the invisibility (and potential
hazards) of traditional narrative modes in African American literary production, on the
other.31 In fact, it is important to note that, while Jazz takes up the history of African
71
America after slavery in a way not accounted for in dominant discourse, my focus is on
the novel's approach to the African American literary tradition in particular.
Meanwhile, the narrator's self-purported "invisibility" also recalls Morrison's
work in Playing in the Dark and the "fishbowl" forms ofliterary production that structure
conventional narrative modes and, consequently, limit historical and social change.
Remember that Morrison has insisted again and again in her critical work that language
and narrative influence social practice. After all, much of American history has been told
using this narrative technique at the expense of people of color and as a means to justify
patriarchy, slavery, and colonialism. In the African American tradition, ifperhaps
unconsciously, these techniques have likewise been adapted-the consequence of which
has been to limit power for women of color specifically. As such, the myopic (though
seemingly omniscient) perspective the narrator ofJazz initially demonstrates is thus
cause for suspicion both because it stagnates narrative and historical potential and
because it relies on narrative modes that evidence hegemonic and hierarchical strategies
of representation. In her arrogance, she misses her "human" characters' capacity to
change, and as the figure responsible primarily for the retelling of African American
literary history in Jazz, she does a serious disservice to that population by assuming, with
godlike power, she knows them best. As a narrator, then, she is essential only insofar as
she helps to illustrate the problems inherent in accepted narrative modes which envision
the author as possessing an unquestionable right to representation; throughout Jazz,
Morrison uses the narrator to demonstrate the limitations of a single, omniscient
perspective, one that offers one, privileged version of a history which has, in reality,
many possible interpretations and outcomes. Of course, the nature of the version of
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history being told is also significant, and Morrison responds specifically to the
historical debate regarding narrative voice in her refusal to privilege the author's
perspective at the expense of all others. In the end, it is clear that the narrator (rather than
the novel's characters) is the figure most in need of "salvation," and this salvation is
accomplished through the help of certain gnostic texts that offer an alternative to the
destructive logic of omniscient narration.
Unlike Beloved, which is replete with biblical imagery and allusions, Jazz
includes relatively little reference to the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the novel's
epigraph is instead taken from the gnostic text, "Thunder, Perfect Mind." This transition
from biblical to gnostic concerns in the first two books of the trilogy helps to explain
some of the latent gnostic allusions in Beloved and parallels the openly gnostic
preoccupations of Paradise. While there is brief mention of Christian response to
violence in the North (the "doomsayers" saw it as evidence of God's wrath and of His
impending judgment), the novel's interest in the Judeo-Christian tradition functions
primarily at the formal level in Jazz and revolves around the issue of voice illustrated in
Gates' literary history (78).32 Here, again, Morrison is concerned with the way sacred
texts get written into cultural production and their consequent influence on history. Of
particular interest is the way theistic language, if allowed to do so, has the potential to
limit storytelling and thus its potential for imagining revolutionary social change; in Jazz
narrative goes hand in hand with historical change by conflating character and reader and
envisioning alternative social action for both. Remember that in her "Nobel Lecture in
Literature," Morrison refers to theistic language as "dead" and claims it "actively thwarts
the intellect, stalls conscience, [and] suppresses human potential" (14).33 This is the
73
problem with texts that invisibly (and often unconsciously) reinforce hegemonic forms
inherited from sacred texts and which limit personal and historical potential. As in the
other two books of the trilogy, however, Morrison doesn't reject Christianity entirely-
she accepts it as a vital and integral part of African American history-but she revises it
instead by including suppressed texts and perspectives, especially those that subvert the
notion of salvation as attainable only through the aid of an established authority (whether
priest or novelist).
To the extent that they offer an alternative to the Judeo-Christian tradition, the
gnostic texts aid in the novel's revision of the function and role of narrative voice.
Quoted in the novel's epigraph, the gnostic text "Thunder, Perfect Mind" presents an
alternative to conventional narration by contradicting the narrator's initial contention that
"no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle" (emphasis mine). Rather than
an omnipotent, otherworldly creator/author who offers the only possibility for personal
and historical salvation, Jazz aligns itself instead with certain gnostic scriptures that
suggest salvation is a primarily personal undertaking. Ultimately, active, participatory
historical revision is required of the audience instead, an idea that resonates well with the
ideas presented to the Swedish Academy on the occasion of Morrison's "Nobel Lecture
in Literature." In that lecture, Morrison tells the story of an old woman, blind but wise,
who is tested by visitors who ask her whether the bird one of them holds is living or
dead.34 Unable to see to confirm the truth, the old woman answers that she doesn't know.
Instead, she says, "what I do know is that [the bird] is in your hands" (11). As Morrison
explains, "her answer can be taken to mean: if it is dead, you have either found it that
way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it. Whether it is to stay alive is
74
your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility" (12). In a fascinating and
revealing narrative move, Jazz concludes with an equivalent image of the book being
held in its reader's hands; by doing so, it implies a parallel responsibility on the part of
the audience. Rather than offer a pithy moral lesson or gnomic pronouncement, Jazz
illustrates a version of narrative as exchange; as in the gnostic formulation, salvation
becomes the responsibility of the seeker, and no savior intercedes. Narrative, then,
provides the interaction, but it is ultimately only part of the equation, and must be
interrogated at each tum for potentially harmful effects.
The way sacred texts influence the literary imagination (and the consequences of
this influence on literary and historical production) is a central concern of both Beloved
and Jazz, and both novels seek to reevaluate those cultural myths and practices that
control which version of history gets told, and by whom. After all, failure to do so allows
power to remain in the hands of the few-those who tell history in a way that ensures the
continuation of their power. The gnostic theology introduced in the novel's epigraph
offers the potential for multiple perspectives by breaking down the hierarchical logic of
theistic language. Spoken in the fIrst-person, Morrison's epigraph in Jazz comes from
the gnostic text, "Thunder, Perfect Mind": "I am the name ofthe sound and the sound of
the name." The gnostic text features a divine speaker who is a complex fusion of
opposites and who resists simple categorization-she is both "fIrst" and "last," "honored"
and "scorned," an "alien" and a "citizen" (Robinson 297,301).35 The novel's epigraph
illustrates this paradox by presenting a chiasmus ("I am the name ofthe sound and the
sound of the name"). The epigraph thus establishes the framework for the novel's
revision of traditional narrative modes, since it encourages a narrative point-of-view that
75
is complex, paradoxical, and unlike hierarchical formulations that envision an
exceptional narrator (the "Best") entitled to represent "the Worst" of his fellow men (Du
Bois 33).
The narrator's own similarity to the feminine, divine speaker of "Thunder, Perfect
Mind" further illustrates Morrison's contrast between orthodox Judeo-Christian belief in
an omniscient, infallible savior/narrator and certain gnostic texts, like "Thunder, Perfect
Mind," which engage the seeker in the process oftheir own representation and salvation.
In Jazz, the divine speaker of the gnostic poem becomes the ideal narrator because her
limitations are self-proclaimed: she is both "knowledge" and "ignorance," reliable and
unreliable (298). Although Morrison's narrator in Jazz at first announces her
omniscience and employs a conventional narrative style, the logic of this position is
quickly exposed and undermined. The narrator's telling, and subsequent retelling, of the
story of Golden Gray-a racially mixed character who plays a significant role in Joe and
Violet's past- serves as one significant moment in Jazz when Morrison's narrative
technique reveals an evolving narrator, one aware of the responsibility she bears to the
story she fashions, and one increasingly more gnostic in formulation. In fact, by the end
of Golden Gray's narrative, the narrator admits her own error: "I have been careless and
stupid and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am"; here the narrator,
like the speaker of "Thunder, Perfect Mind" begins to recognize herself as somewhat
paradoxical (160). The aim here, ofcourse, and the work the novel's gnostic epigraph
helps to articulate, is to present a narrator whose own attempts to write herself into being
don't come at the expense of her characters-the same debate prefigured by Wright,
Hurston, and Ellison, and to which Jazz returns. In fact, the narrator is revised and
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modified throughout the novel so that by the end she most resembles the gnostic
speaker of the epigraph. Such a self-transformation erases distinctions between author
and reader at the same time as it answers Du Bois' critical question regarding "How [...]
the Negro [Shall] Be Portrayed" (Gates 179),36
The novel itself remains authoritative, but with a new relationship to its reader.
To illustrate this point, Jazz concludes with a twist on the African American trope of the
"Talking Book," a metaphor of the double-voiced text, as illustrated by Gates in The
SignifYing Monkey,37 Born ofDu Bois's notion of "double consciousness," whereby the
African American subject "feels his two-ness,-an American, a Negro; two souls, two
thoughts, two umeconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body," a double-
voiced text is one that similarly articulates its dual position as a text with both white and
black literary antecedents (Gates xxiii).38 As a means ofresponding to the debate over
the role of narrative voice initiated by Wright, Ellison, and Hurston, Morrison takes the
essentially figurative model of the Talking Book and makes it literal by having the book
itself talk to the reader at the novel's end:
I love the way you (the reader) hold me, how close you let me be to you. I
like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watchedyour face for
a long time now, and missedyour eyebrows when you went away from me.
Talking to you and hearing you answer-that's the kick. (229)
By introducing the second person for the first time in the novel and creating an intimate
and interactive moment with the reader, Jazz calls attention to the reader's own
relationship to the history the text only helps to recount, and it offers them a voice not
usually permitted in conventional narrative forms. Through the trope of the Talking
77
Book, Morrison grounds the novel in the actual world of the reader; after all, the book
must be talking to someone. This position refutes the model of narrative voice
envisioned by Wright and others and articulates the idea of narrative as exchange rather
than as a privileged story told by an omniscient and infallible author/narrator. Just as
significantly, though, Morrison's use of the trope of the Talking Book also reminds the
reader of its history, with its connection to the ideas of double-consciousness and double-
voiced texts, serving as a reminder of the dual role of the African American author
influenced by both white and black literary antecedents (and the potentially harmful
effects of these influences).39 The actual work of historical revision ultimately falls to the
responsibility of the audience as much as to the narrator, author, or novel as a whole.
It is on this note that Morrison concludes Jazz, thereby rendering the novel not
ultimately agnostic but, instead, deeply invested in the reader's own understanding, or
gnosis. The narrator continues her emphasis on the reader's responsibility to African
American history at the novel's end by highlighting the reader's hands, which now hold
the speaking text:
But I can't say that aloud; I can't tell anyone that I have been waiting for
this all my life and that being chosen to wait is the reason I can. If I were
able 1'd say it. Say make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am
free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.
(229)
Here, the narrator echoes a biblical lexicon that views Christ as "chosen," or elected, for
the role of Savior (Isaiah 42:1), but rather than relying on the image of the Savior's nail-
scarred hands as a symbol of a saving power, she asks the readers to look at their own:
78
"look, look. Look where your hands are. Now" (229). By rewriting the biblical
concept ofthe Savior and grounding the moment in the physical rather than the fictional,
Jazz highlights gnostic epistemologies at the same time as it transfers authority to its
African American audience. In insisting the reader "make [her], remake [her]," it is clear
that Jazz speaks not only to the necessity ofa revision of traditional narrative techniques
that favor an omniscient, "God's eye" point-of-view but also to the need for active,
participatory historical revision on the part of the reader; Jazz assumes a black audience
and gives it the voice often denied them in American literature. This, the novel suggests,
is the only possible "salvation" and the only way to remove the needle of history stuck
indefinitely in its groove. Ultimately, Jazz achieves this feat with the help ofthe gnostic
tradition and without succumbing to a nihilism that would render the text (and historical
revision) meaningless in the process.
It takes the entire novel to get to this point, however, and many significant plots
and subplots to shape this revision. The narrator in Jazz is of utmost importance in this
process, and the gnostic tradition helps to facilitate her self-transformation throughout.
Despite the fact that, in the beginning ofJazz, the narrator feigns omniscience and seems
to follow a conventional narrative style, she does share important similarities with the
gnostic speaker of "Thunder, Perfect Mind"; both narrators speak in first-person, and they
remain equally anonymous. Nowhere is the narrator more clearly aligned with the divine
speaker of "Thunder, Perfect Mind," however, than in her discussion of Violet and
Violet's opposite, whom the Harlem community calls "Violent." The narrator, on the
other hand, refers to Violet's alter ego as "that Violet": "maybe that Violet, the one who
knew where the butcher knife was and was strong enough to use it, had the hips [Violet]
79
had lost. But if that Violet was strong and had hips, why was she proud oftrying to
kill a dead girl, and she was proud" (94). Both the narrator and the community try to
differentiate between the two Violets-the nice woman who fixes their hair, on the one
hand, and the crazy one who shows up at a funeral just to "mess up" the face of a dead
girl, on the other (211). However, although they make a distinction between the two
women, Jazz makes it clear that both halves ofViolet comprise the whole, so when
Violet "buttoned her coat and left the drugstore [she noticed], at the same moment as that
Violet did, that it was spring" (114). Like the divine speaker of the gnostic poem, Violet
is composed of opposites-most obviously violence and nonviolence-but rather than
separate her into one or the other, the novel envisions a complex woman who
encompasses both and who thus resists the danger of becoming a stagnant and predictable
character. It also formulates Violet as a character quite unlike the stereotyped caricatures
ofnarrative strategies that thematize characters in binaries in order to uphold the
hierarchical positioning of the narrator or author. By creating a character who
simultaneously exhibits both destructive and creative qualities, Morrison additionally
aligns Violet with the divine speaker of "Thunder, Perfect Mind," an alignment that gains
more significance as the novel continues.
In fact, in a surprising and critical move, the narrative slips seamlessly into
Violet's voice as it describes her alter ego ("that Violet") and her actions at the funeral.
This is especially significant since it functions to conflate the character/narrator
distinction and renders the speaker ambiguous; at this moment, it is both Violet and the
narrator speaking:
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That's why it took so much wrestling to get me down, keep me down and out
of that coffin where she was the heifer who took what was mine, what I
chose, picked out and determined to have and hold on to, NO! that Violet
is not somebody walking round town, up and down the streets wearing my
skin and using my eyes shit no that Violet is me! The me that hauled hay
in Virginia and handled a four-mule team in the brace. (95-96)
As the narrative has already revealed, Joe and Violet met in Virginia and worked the
fields before moving to the City; this brief passage indicates that Violet (but even more
specifically, "that Violet") is actually the narrator herself. Yet just as easily, and with no
change in form to indicate a shift in speaker, the narrative slips out ofViolet's voice to
recount her thoughts in the drugstore: "sitting in the thin sharp light of the drugstore
playing with a long spoon in a tall glass made her think ofanother woman occupying
herself at a table pretending to drink from a cup. Her mother" (97).40 The crack in the
narrative framework is hardly perceptible-and just as quickly as it opens it closes-but
there can be no denying the crucial connection Morrison makes here between "that
Violet" and the novel's narrator, a connection that also equates the narrator with the
gnostic speaker of "Thunder, Perfect Mind" and lays the groundwork for the work the
novel does to unravel the conventions of accepted narrative modes and rework them to
revise the invisible power dynamics inherent in imaginative production. At stake here is
the authority of such production itself, but again-and through the aid of the gnostic
ideas presented in Jazz-Morrison insists the novel can retain its authority without
resorting to other, more insidious, forms of the same subjugation it seeks to escape.
81
Although at the beginning of the novel, the narrator claimed omniscience-"I
know that woman. Know her husband, too."-by the time Jazz gets to the story of
Golden Gray, the narrator is ready to admit that her story is, at least partially, a
fabrication:
Joe acts like he knew all about what the old folks did to keep on going, but
he couldn't have known much about True Belle, for example, because I
doubt Violet ever talked to him about her grandmother-and never about
her mother. So he didn't know. Neither do I, although it's not hard to
imagine what it must have been like. (137)
Here, instead of claiming knowledge, the narrator admits her ignorance. In both versions
of the narrative that follow, the narrator continually inserts her presence and
acknowledges the fact that imagination, not reality, is generating the story. Neither does
she make claims to the ultimate truth of her narrative. In fact, in this section, she
repeatedly begins her account with only tentative claims to its authority: "More important
Miss Vera Louise might help her buy them all out with paper money [ ]. Then again,
maybe not. Maybe [True Belle] frowned as she sat in the baggage car [ ]. Maybe she
felt bad" (142, emphasis mine). Throughout the section, the narrator repeats the mantra,
"maybe," in more than half a dozen instances, admits that she "[doesn't] know" at several
other moments, and acknowledges her own involvement in the shaping of Golden Gray's
story: "1 like to think of him that way" (150). At the same time, she makes known her
desire (and sense of responsibility) to tell the story in a way that does justice to the
characters: "What was I thinking of? How could I have imagined him so poorly?" (160).
It is clear that the narrator's perspective begins to shift in this critical moment in Jazz and
82
that here, too, traditional narrative modes (with their desire for one, authoritative
version of the story at the expense of all others) are at odds with more positive models of
storytelling that are able to acknowledge multiple perspectives. After this point, it
becomes difficult not to see the Golden Gray narrative as a continuation of Morrison's
response to the historical debate regarding narrative voice, and the narrative that follows
leads to the novel's final position regarding the role of language and power in literary
production. 1
The story of Golden Gray begins with True Belle, Violet's maternal grandmother.
Since Morrison has already made the connection between the narrator and that Violet,
Violet's alter ego, it makes sense that the novel's first-person narrator would be familiar
with the story of Golden Gray, the mixed child of Miss Vera Louise, the white woman
True Belle leaves her own family to follow to Baltimore. Raised by the two women,
Golden Gray grows up ignorant of the facts of his birth because, as the narrator recounts
it, "Vera Louise had smiled and said, 'But he's golden. Completely golden!' So they
named him that and didn't take him to the Catholic Foundling Hospital, where whitegirls
deposited their mortification" (148). Later, when Golden Gray is eighteen, Vera Louise
tells him the truth about his African American father, and he discovers that although "he
had always thought there was only one kind-True Belle's kind. Black and nothing[,]
[...] there was another kind-like himself' (149).41 This news comes as such a shock
that he rides off "to find, then kill, ifhe was lucky, his father" (143). This is the last True
Belle ever sees of him, which means it's the last Violet would have known of him, and
yet the narrative continues to recount the experience of Golden Gray on his quest to kill
his father (143). It is clear that, after this point, the narrator is operating entirely within
83
the fictional world she's creating, and she even admits that she's "thought about him a
lot, wondered whether he was what True Belle loved and Violet too. Or the vain and
nincty pinchnose worrying about his coat and the ivory buttons on his waistcoat? Come
all that way to insult not his father but his race" (143). Whatever happens after Golden
Gray leaves Baltimore is not based on any known facts or authoritative "truth" but on the
narrator's own attempts to come to terms with a history that Jazz makes clear is also her
own.
42
As the child of both white and black parents, Golden Gray serves throughout Jazz
as a figure for the product of a "double-voiced" and dual literary ancestry, with both
black and white antecedents and as outlined above. As the narrative continues, it reveals
Golden Gray as another author fashioning a story largely of and for himself and not
unlike the kind of narrative Wright celebrated but which omits certain, essential elements
of the story in an effort to portray himself in the best possible light. Most significant to
the historical context of this story are Golden Gray's interactions with Wild, a "berry-
black woman" who, almost uncannily like Beloved at the end of the novel named after
her, is living naked, pregnant, and alone in the woods (144),43 She, like Beloved-and
the women living on the outskirts of the Ruby community in Paradise-represents in
Jazz all the silenced voices of African American history and particularly those of black
women; thus Golden Gray's interactions with and responses to the woman named Wild
are telling of the relationship between the largely male-dominated African American
literary tradition of the period recounted in Jazz and those silenced in the wake of their
successes. On his journey, Golden Gray gets caught in a downpour while riding in his
carriage, believes the left wheel has struck a stone, and stops to check whether his trunk
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has been dislocated (143). When he disembarks, he sees "a woman. She is covered
with mud and leaves are in her hair. Her eyes are large and terrible" (144). "As soon as
she sees him," the narrative recounts, "[the woman] starts then turns suddenly to run, but
in turning before she looks she knocks her head against the tree she has been leaning on.
[...] The blow knocks her down and out" (144). Most ofthe narrative following this
scene details Golden Gray's fears about this woman, whom he rescues with some
apprehension and only in an effort to make himself look good. In fact, he vacillates
between versions of the story he will tell his father, ofhow he saved the woman and
brought her to the cabin, and covered her nakedness with the dress he found there. But,
when the narrator calls his bluff-"I know he is a hypocrite; that he is shaping a story for
himself to tell somebody"-it is clear that she, too, is doing the same (154). After all, she
is the narrator of his story, and the same narrative dangers exist for her as for Golden
Gray. As the author ofher own version of African American history, then, Morrison
takes pains not to repeat the same mistakes she exposes in her own literary antecedents;
despite his many character flaws, by the end of the section, Golden Gray is presented as
an ultimately redeemable character.
More importantly, the narrator's exposure of Golden Gray's hypocrisy reveals her
own increasing self-consciousness and her desire to make visible, rather than render
invisible, the armatures ofnarrative production. So, when Golden Gray takes his
baggage into the house before the woman whose head is bleeding, the narrator admits her
own concern and involvement:
That is what makes me worry about him. How he thinks first of his
clothes, and not the woman. How he checks the fastenings, but not her
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breath. It's hard to get past that, but then he scrapes the mud from his
Baltimore soles before he enters a cabin with a dirt floor and I don't hate
him much anymore. (151)
Here, the narrator struggles to decide which version of the narrative she should tell.
Prone to the same tendencies as Golden Gray, she gets caught up in her own biases
before she catches herself and revises her opinion ofhim. On the one hand, it is clear that
Golden Gray thinks first ofhimself; the woman is little more than a prop in the story he
fashions to tell his father. On the other, however, he is still a human being ensnared in
his own personal trauma, and he is a gentleman to the core. Like Violet, and many ofthe
other characters in Jazz, Golden Gray is a complex and paradoxical character. Although
he is both reprehensible and redeemable in the same moment, the narrator takes pains to
present Golden Gray in a way that acknowledges his flaws at the same time as it accepts
them as a part of the whole, human equation. As the novel progresses, it is clear that
she-perhaps more than Golden Gray-must work hardest to avoid stagnancy and
predictability and to resist hierarchical, self-righteous proclamations that establish her
authority and cast her in a flattering light. Without this self-transformation, the novel is
set to repeat its original, fatal narrative.
The narrator works hard to accomplish this task, however. In fact, later in the
second version of Golden Gray's narrative, she adjusts her opinion again regarding
Golden Gray:
Aw, but he is young, young, and he is hurting, so I forgive him for his
self-deception and his grand, fake gestures, and when I watch him sipping
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too quickly the cane liquor he has found, worrying about his coat and not
tending to the girl, I don't hate him at all. (155)
Rather than her earlier claim that she "[doesn't] hate him much anymore," now the
narrator admits she "[doesn't] hate him at all." Seeing Golden Gray's pain stirs the
narrator's compassion; yet, pity isn't ultimately the best perspective, either, as Jazz
makes clear. At last, the narrator settles on a third point of view:
Now I have to think this through, carefully, even though I may be doomed
to another misunderstanding. I have to do it and not break down. Not
hating him is not enough; liking, loving him is not useful. I have to alter
things. I have to be a shadow that wishes him well [...]. Lie down next
to him, a wrinkle in the sheet, and contemplate his pain and by doing so
ease it, diminish it. I want to be the language that wishes him well. (161)
In the narrator's final view, "not hating him is not enough; liking, loving him is not
useful." What the narrator finally settles on is the idea that she has the power (indeed, the
responsibility) to "alter things," and that "language" is the key to making this difference.
This emphasis on language serves as a reminder that Jazz is deeply invested in these
formal questions concerning narrative structure and voice as prefigured in the Hurston-
Wright-Ellison debates of the period.
Hating him, loving him, liking him-the novel claims that none of these positions
is ultimately very useful-but Jazz makes it clear through the narrator's brief moments of
self-consciousness that she has a responsibility to use language to enable (rather than
disable) Golden Gray and the other characters she encounters. Revising destructive
language and narrative modes thus serves as the vehicle through which both the
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characters and the narrator can come to terms with a shared history. And, although to
this point in Jazz the narrator's evolution has been at the forefront, the characters
themselves actually control the story, as the novel soon makes clear. In fact, by the end
ofthe novel, a humbled narrator admits the extent of her own delusion:
They knew how little I could be counted on; how poorly, how shabbily my
know-it-all self covered helplessness. That when I invented stories about
them-and doing it seemed to me so fine-I was completely in their
hands, managed without mercy. [...] It never occurred to me that they
were thinking other thoughts, feeling other feelings, putting their lives
together in ways I never dreamed of. (220, 221)
The narrator of Jazz assumes she knows her characters, that what she says of them was
the truth, and that there is no other way to tell their story. Rather than uphold its
authority, Jazz insists, again and again, on the faulty nature of this narrative model; the
novel here claims that despite her beliefs to the contrary, the narrator "was completely in
[her characters'] hands.,,44 The real work of storytelling, and by extension of revisionary
history, is taken up instead by the characters who are "putting their lives together in ways
[the narrator] never dreamed of." Throughout Jazz, Morrison utilizes the gnostic texts to
illuminate the fact that certain narrative strategies incorporated in the African American
tradition-and especially omniscient narration--do nothing more than uphold the same
forms of power their authors struggled against. The novel's gnostic epigraph, spoken by
a feminine divine power, facilitates Morrison's revision of conventional narrative forms
in Jazz and presents an alternative mode of literary production that conceives of narrative
as an exchange rather than a hierarchy. In addition to the work the novel does to revise
88
the figure of the narrator, the novel's final image of the reader holding the speaking
book is significant in its refusal to privilege literature as the bearer of either personal or
historical salvation. In the end, both author and audience collaborate to produce new
forms of narrative that give voice to the silenced "Beloveds" of African American
history; the old, blind woman of the "Nobel Lecture in Literature," who Morrison tells us
after all is a figure for the author, concludes her story by insisting: "Look. How lovely it
is, this thing we have done-together" (12, 30). This kind of community
accomplishment assures that the power of representation is shared evenly and isn't
abused, even in the name of liberation.
* * *
In Morrison's trilogy, these "Beloved" figures of African American history-
Beloved herself, Wild in Jazz, and the unruly women living in a Convent on the outskirts
of the Ruby community in Paradise-all serve as a reminder that the relationship among
sacred, political, and literary history is often vexed and complicated. In Playing in the
Dark, Morrison maintains "cultural identities are formed and informed by a nation's
literature" (39). In her "Nobel Lecture in Literature," she claims "narrative is radical,
creating us at the very moment it is being created" (27). Such a powerful connection
between literary production and cultural practice means that literature must be carefully
scrutinized to expose moments when language serves to justify personal ambition or reify
a dominant perspective at the expense of others. In all three novels of the trilogy, it is
clear that Morrison is taking seriously the long-standing tradition of the African
89
American church as a locus of social deliverance, yet at the same time as she engages
with that tradition, it is also apparent that she offers her own revisions to it, especially in
the name ofthose who have been silenced along the way. As these "Beloved" figures
also demonstrate, the question of power, who wields it and over whom, often divides
down gender lines. On this point, the gnostic tradition, and the poem "Thunder, Perfect
Mind" especially, seems for Morrison instrumental as a means of rethinking conventional
narrative forms and a way of revising the Judeo-Christian tradition from within. As
Morrison is keenly aware, an ongoing concern with religious engagement as a vehicle for
social and political activism remains an integral part of the African American experience,
but such a position doesn't justify the destructive logic historically embedded in its
practices. Neither should the work of imaginative production reinforce this logic.
Acknowledging these silenced voices ofAfrican American history, and exposing
the narrative forms that enable their omission, provides the central work of the trilogy.
While the narrator ofJazz, for example, mistakenly believes that "all the while [Joe] was
running through the streets in bad weather [...] he was looking for [Dorcas]," in reality,
Joe was looking for Wild, who is potentially and most likely, though never definitively
described as, his mother. Never knowing the truth, and never having any contact with
Wild, drives Joe into the arms of Dorcas: "he was trying to catch a girl he was yet to see,
but his heart knew all about, and [Violet was] holding on to him but wishing he was the
golden boy [she] never saw either. Which means from the very beginning [Violet] was a
substitute and so was he" (97). The "golden boy" Violet loves is, of course, Golden
Gray, and she internalizes his narrative (inherited from her grandmother True Belle) to
the point that she denies her own voice and her own narrative. Clearly, both Joe and
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Violet are affected by the destructive history passed down to them-the silences and
omissions inevitable when certain voices are privileged over others-so the dissolution of
their relationship hardly comes as a surprise. As Jazz has shown, however, history need
not function like a needle stuck in the record groove, and the couple's crisis is only
temporary. When the characters come to terms with the past and recognize the losses
inherited from it, they are able to move forward in a spirit of friendship and
reconciliation. Even the narrator (perhaps especially so because she serves as a figure for
the author) must acknowledge Wild and other Beloveds ofAfrican American history
before her work is complete; when she does, the text casts the moment in terms of the
narrator's own achievement ofgnosis, or knowledge: [Wild] has seen me and is not
afraid of me. She hugs me. Understands me. Has given me her hand. I am touched by
her. Released in secret. Now I know" (221, emphasis mine). This is the process of
acknowledgment and self-knowledge that Jazz insists is crucial to its revisionary project.
This endeavor is explicitly cast in gendered terms. All the "Beloveds" of the
trilogy are women, and these women figure significantly into the narratives of both men
and women throughout the three novels. Joe and Violet likewise represent fractured (and
gendered) relationships in the African American community caused by the adoption of
patriarchy and Christianity, the oppressor's own social structures and ideologies; the fact
that Joe and Violet reconcile at the novel's end speaks volumes about Morrison's own
prognosis for ongoing gender relationships in that community, provided destructive
theistic language and restrictive narrative forms derived from these systems are exposed
and revised.45 Yet the work she does to accomplish this feat is not fully accomplished in
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Jazz, and the question of gender, and the role it has played in African American history
in particular, is explored more fully as we tum to Paradise.
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NOTES
I Collins' other work with apocalypse as a literary genre has been helpful as
well. See especially The Apocalyptic Imagination and The Encyclopedia of
Apocalypticism. Adela Yarbro Collins' Early Christian Apocalypticism extends the
works ofApocalypse: The Morphology ofa Genre, which helped to define "apocalypse,"
to study the social settings and functions of particular, early Christian apocalypses.
2 The second apocalypse is only "gnostic" insofar as it "places greater emphasis
on salvation through knowledge, which is extended into [Sethe's] personal afterlife"
(Apocalypse, 13). Morrison never explicitly aligns this second "revelation" with the
gnostic tradition, although it is clear she is challenging the normative idea of apocalypse
as end-of-the-world destruction that will balance the scales ofhistory.
3 "Rememory" is a complicated concept that involves more than merely
remembering the past. Instead, rememory is something that is always out there
"haunting" the present. When Sethe explains rememory to Denver, she claims: "If a
house burns down, it's gone, but the place-the picture of it-stays, and not just in my
rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out
there outside my head. I mean, even if! don't think it, even if! die, the picture of what I
did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened" (36).
4 Although Sethe also tries to kill her other three children-Denver, Buglar, and
Howard-at the same time, the "crawling already? girl" is the only casualty (110).
5 See in particular Susan Bowers' "Beloved and the New Apocalypse," Robert L.
Broad's "Giving Blood to the Scraps: Haints, History, and Hosea in Beloved," Carolyn A.
Mitchell's "'I Love to Tell the Story': Biblical Revisions in Beloved," Ann-Janine
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Morey's "Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison: Reflections on Postmodernism and the
Study of Religion and Literature," and Danille Taylor-Guthrie's "Who are the Beloved?
Old and New Testaments, Old and New Communities of Faith."
6 Critics have additionally suggested both West African and Hindu influences in
Beloved as an alternative to the Judeo-Christian tradition and as illustrated through the
novel's cyclical treatment of time and through the ongoing relationships Beloved's
characters have with the dead (Bowers, Morey). At the same time, however, the lines
between these influences are often blurred, with characters responding to elements of
several traditions, and in the end it is not entirely clear that the alternative is meant to
replace the original. Ella and Stamp Paid, the man who ferried Sethe across the Ohio
River to freedom, know, for example, "that people who die bad don't stay in the ground,"
although they do try to reconcile this belief with their Christian faith (221). After all,
they conclude, "Jesus Christ Himself didn't [stay there]" (221). Yet this perspective
diminishes the miracle of Christ's resurrection by suggesting its banality. When Stamp
Paid hears voices surrounding Sethe's house (called "124" in the novel), he believes they
are "older, but not stronger, than He Himself was" (202). This subverts the notion of the
Judeo-Christian God as "before all things" while at the same time upholding the idea of
His omnipotence (Colossians 1: 17). Likewise, many of the women who gather to
exorcise Beloved are Christians, yet their singing indicates familiarity with another
spiritual awareness as well. This alternative tradition, while analogous in some ways to
West African and Hindu religious belief, bears even more striking similarities to the
gnostic tradition prevalent in Jazz and Paradise--especially in its emphasis on revelation
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and self-knowledge-and initiates the transition from biblical to gnostic preoccupations
in the first and second books of Morrison's trilogy. As such, it provides a way of
critiquing and revising Christianity without entirely rejecting a tradition that has played a
significant role in African American history.
7 The "children of the promise" refers to those people (Jew and Gentile) who
have renounced the wickedness of the world and have been saved through faith in Jesus
Christ.
8 Of course, Beloved's reappearance in Jazz as Wild and in Paradise as the
figures of the Convent women serves as a reminder that such recovery is never entirely
finished.
9 Robert L. Broad has argued that Morrison's use of Romans in the novel
illuminates 8t. Paul's manipulation of the Old Testament passage to fit his own argument
for predestination:
Paul suppresses the historical context of the quoted passage in order to use
it for his own purposes and directly against the descendants of Hosea for
whom and to whom Hosea was, after all, writing. Paul's is a classic case
of a writer dehistoricizing a text in order to appropriate that text for
purposes that violate, and even contradict, its original meaning (194).
Danille K. Taylor-Guthrie, by contrast, has argued for a much more positive
reading of the Romans passage, suggesting that "the Biblical gospel as preached
by Paul declares a new community of faith and world order as having been
established" and implying that Morrison's audience would naturally align
-------------- - ---------
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themselves with this new community and, therefore, read Morrison's epigraph as
being more optimistic than critical (120).
10 In both biblical passages, the emphasis is on divine mercy, but with radically
different results. In Hosea, as illustrated above, God tells the prophet to forgive his
adulterous wife and to show her mercy in the same way God will show mercy to the
Israelites (the Jews). In Romans, St. Paul asserts that, once again, God will show mercy
(based on faith rather than on adherence to the law); "[Salvation] does not, therefore,
depend on man's desire or effort, but on God's mercy" (9: 16). This time, however, St.
Paul argues that God will show mercy to some (the Gentiles) at the expense of others (the
Jews):
What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore
with great patience the objects of his wrath-prepared for destruction?
What ifhe did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of
his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory-even us, whom he
also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles? (9: 22-3)
In his argument for predestination and for the adoption of the Gentiles as "children of the
promise," St. Paul manipulates the original passage from Hosea to argue for a divine
mercy that is based on exclusion. In this formulation, the Gentile is saved because the
Jew is not: "Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens
whom he wants to harden. [... ] Does not the potter have the right to make out of the
same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for ignoble?" (verses 18,
21). This passage actually reverses God's promise to the Israelites in Hosea by changing
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the definition of an Israelite from "one born of the clan of Israel" to "one adopted into it"
as a child of the promise. By extension: if, in fact, the Jews are not actually "chosen" as
recipients in Christ's promise of salvation, then their preservation is inessential. The
same goes for any group ofpeople the Church decides are created for "ignoble purposes."
11 In the biblical apocalypse, by contrast, time "is essentially linear. Time
becomes the vehicle of divine purpose: It moves teleologically [...] toward a specified
end" (Zamora 13). This concept extends to the narrative pattern as well: "like
apocalypse, most plots may be described as a teleology ofwords and episodes, as
comprehensible structures ofaction that are interrelated in a legible whole" (13).
Morrison's departure from this model in Beloved, as we shall see, is only one of several
revisions she makes to the biblical model: while the references to the book ofRevelation
here are clear, she does disrupt the conventions of biblical apocalypse throughout the
novel in favor of an alternate, revised form.
12 Zamora quotes Phelan when he additionally argues that:
Linked to this prophecy was another, found throughout the apocalyptic
literature of the time, that the Jews would be converted as the end of the
world approached. If the Indians were the lost tribes of Israel, and if they
were converted, both prophecies would be fulfilled at once and the
kingdom of God might be initiated. (8)
13 The overwhelming majority of texts contained in The Nag Hammadi Library
are a part of the literary genres defined by the editors as "apocalyptic," "revelation
dialogue," or "revelation discourse," with several others exhibiting influences from those
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traditions. The apocalyptic texts in The Nag Hammadi Library include "The Apocalypse
of Peter," "The Apocalypse ofAdam," "The (First) Apocalypse of James," "The
(Second) Apocalypse of James," "Marsanes," "Melchizedek," and "Zoztrianos." Defined
as revelation dialogue or revelation discourse: "The Gospel of Mary," "Allogenes," "The
Second Treatise of the Great Seth," "The Thunder, Perfect Mind," "Eugnostos the
Blessed," and "The Book of Thomas the Contender." Texts influenced by these three
literary traditions but not falling squarely within anyone category include "Hypostasis of
the Archons" (revelation discourse), "Dialogue of the Savior" (contains fragments of an
apocalyptic vision), "The Concept of our Great Power" (end of the world narrative), and
"The Three Steles of Seth" (revelation).
14 As Zamora argues in Writing the Apocalypse, "the moral dualism of
apocalypse is embodied in the metaphoric contraries of the Christ and Antichrist, whore
and bride, Babylon and the New Jerusalem, this world and the next" (12). By refusing to
either "approve or condemn Sethe's rough choice," Beloved rejects these Manichaean
binaries in favor of a (potentially) more inclusive gnostic hermeneutics (212).
15 In some apocalyptic gnostic texts, there is one, hostile figure who deters
ascent into the higher realms on the gnostic's heavenly journey (Robinson 257).
16 It is important to note that while Sethe's violence is ultimately prevented when
Denver tackles her, Morrison doesn't entirely erase the possibility for violent action.
Rather than go to the opposite extreme and envision a world that excludes violence of
any kind, she acknowledges its existence and allows its presence-yet doesn't privilege it
as the primary tool for regeneration or renewal as usually seen in apocalyptic texts which
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favor the biblical model. This inclusivity becomes especially significant in both Jazz and
Paradise.
17 This point has been taken up, in one form or another, by nearly every critical
account of Beloved.
18 In Jazz, Morrison's epigraph comes from the gnostic text "Thunder, Perfect
Mind" and repeats Beloved's final emphasis on sound; in it, a feminine, divine speaker
tells her audience: "I am the name of the sound and the sound of the name" (Robinson
302). In this second book of the trilogy, Morrison essentially begins where she left off in
Beloved, stressing the necessity of a revision of Christian sacred texts through the
inclusion of suppressed gnostic texts and ideas. Morrison's emphasis on gnostic thought
as an alternative to the Judeo-Christian tradition is made explicit in the epigraphs in both
Jazz and Beloved. Additionally, her use of the word "like" (i.e. "Sethe trembled like the
baptized") indicates that the text is operating outside the Judeo-Christian tradition, while
still similar in some ways (emphasis mine).
19 Of course, the "word" also refers to the Western, written tradition Douglass
and other authors of slave narratives of the time aim to establish their authority in and
their rejection of an earlier, oral tradition (the "sound") to do so. This is yet another
reminder that Morrison is deeply invested in examining the consequences of formal
strategies of literary production and their relationship to knowledge and power.
20 Similarly, the idea of repetition plays itself out in the novel through references
to "tracks," both the "tracks" that Joe, the hunter, is bound to follow on his quest for
Dorcas and the "tracks" which the City lays for its inhabitants, thus "controlling their
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feet" and dictating their actions (32). As critics such as Vincent O'Keefe and Patricia
Hunt have pointed out, the City in this formulation is thus linked to the orthodoxy, while
the Country (represented by the South and by Wild, Joe's maybe/maybe not mother)
represents the alternative and unorthodox and must be taken into consideration before the
characters are able to ignite change.
21 Although the Bible is certainly not the first text to utilize omniscient narration,
it can be understood as the primary source of its usage in American literature since the
Judeo-Christian tradition has been foundational to American mainstream culture.
22 In 1899, in The Philadelphia Negro, W. E. B. Du Bois claimed that "without
wholly conscious effort the Negro church has become a centre of social intercourse to a
degree unknown in white churches" and that "consequently all movements for social
betterment are apt to centre in the churches" (203, 207). In 1982, in Prophesy
Deliverance!, Cornel West argued that "revolutionary Christian perspective and praxis
enact the Afro-American humanist tradition in the postrnodern period" and that "these are
guided by the norms of individuality and democracy as proposed by the prophetic
Christian viewpoint, promoted by the progressive Marxist orientation, and promulgated
by revolutionary activity" (131). This prophetic Christian viewpoint, West contends, is
informed by the progressive Marxist politics of the twentieth century to create a hybrid
form of Christian liberation theology that then provides the foundation for social change.
With a prevalent and outstanding history of church-based social activism in the African
American community, it is only natural that the dialogue would continue in the works of
contemporary African African authors; after all, as Toni Morrison argues in Playing in
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the Dark, "national literatures [...] end up describing and inscribing what is really on the
national mind" (14). In fact, Morrison's Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, comprising a
trilogy which spans the history of African America to date, enter this debate without
exception.
The humanist tradition West refers to is one of four responses, West argues in
Prophecy Deliverance!, to modern racist discourse-the other three responses being
exceptionalism, assimilationism, and marginalism. In West's formulation, the humanist
response to modern racist discourse is the only tradition that
does not romanticize or reject Afro-American culture; instead it accepts
this culture for what it is, the expression of an oppressed human
community imposing its distinctive form of order on an existential chaos,
explaining its political predicament, preserving its self-respect, and
projecting its own special hopes for the future. (85)
West further argues that the best example of the African American humanist tradition is
in its music and its literature-from Toomer to Ellison (85-91). For a thorough account of
African American religious history, see especially C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H.
Mamija's The Black Church in the African American Experience (1990), African
American Religious Thought, edited by Cornel West and Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. (2003), and
Michael Battle's The Black Church in America: African American Christian Spirituality
(2006).
23 While her analysis of the novel's biblical allusions is helpful, the article does
little to fully explain Jazz's gnostic preoccupations.
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24 For another account of the gnostic influences in Jazz, see also Patricia Hunt's
'''Free to do something wild': History and the Ancestor in Jazz" (1995). John Leonard
also mentions the gnostic epigraph in his "Review ofJazz" (1992).
25 "Agnosticism" comes from the Greek "a," meaning "without," combined with
"gnosis," often translated as "knowledge." In its simplest definition, then, agnosticism is
a belief system that views the truth regarding the existence of God, gods, or other deities
as "unknowable." Gnosticism, by contrast, translates to "knowing," and in fact, often
refers to a secret knowledge, or "insight," available only to a select few.
26 For a basic overview of the gnostic tradition, see especially Elaine Pagels's
The Gnostic Gospels, a text that, while admittedly dated, remains helpful as a general
introduction for those new to religious scholarship (1979). While it is true that religious
scholars often view Pagels' work as a somewhat oversimplified account of the gnostic
tradition, it is helpful to know that Morrison herself is familiar with Pagels' work through
their academic interactions at Princeton. John Leonard, in his "Review ofJazz," has even
suggested that Morrison and Pagels regularly meet: "Morrison now spends part of every
week at Princeton with Elaine Pagels" (48). As such, Pagels' text remains an important
introduction to the work Morrison does with the gnostic epigraph in Jazz. For a more
detailed, up-to-date example of scholarship on the gnostic tradition, however, Karen
King's What is Gnosticism (2003) remains an excellent source.
27 If the novel doesn't have the responsibility of "saving" the reader, then the
issue of the narrator's reliability or unreliability isn't particularly relevant.
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28 This "resurrection" of Dorcas in the form of her friend, Felice, may be an
allusion to Acts 9: 36-42 and the biblical character of Dorcas.
29 The use ofthe masculine in Du Bois' quote, although most likely meant to
indicate all people, male and female, nonetheless gives a clue to the often-gendered
hierarchies born of these kinds of discriminatory formulations.
30 Growing out of this historical debate, the postmortem violence Violet directs
at Dorcas alludes to Bigger Thomas' postmortem destruction ofMary Dalton's body in
Richard Wright's Native Son. This is especially important since Wright was a key figure
in the debate surrounding the use of narrative voice in the period and because Native Son
employs a third-person omniscient narrator; as such, it is exemplary of the author's own
position regarding representation. Morrison makes the connection here between the
third-person omniscient narrator of Native Son and the role of the "individual black
talent" described above. In Jazz, Morrison also explores the psychological effects of
racism on the African American community, but rather than assign ultimate omnipotence
to the narrator (in Jazz the figure of the author), she hands over the power of
representation, of storytelling, to her formerly "voiceless black countrymen" instead. If
anything, she seems to argue that the narrator is just as susceptible to the effects of racism
as anyone else. In Jazz, this is evidenced by the narrator's necessary transformation at
the hands of the gnostic epigraph.
31 Morrison seems to suggest that omniscient narration is characteristic of the
African American literary tradition during this period.
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32 During the violent and tense atmosphere of Harlem in 1926, for example, the
narrator recounts that the only women who weren't armed were Christian----{)r else "silent
or crazy or dead" (78). Rather than carry weapons, those "doomsayers" believed that "in
God's eye and theirs, every hateful word and gesture was the Beast's desire for its own
filth" (9, 78). This imagery of the Beast echoes Beloved's preoccupation with violent
apocalypse, but in Jazz, the unarmed doomsayers are the exception rather than the rule.
33 In the novel, of course, such language doesn't limit storytelling-Joe and
Violet's actions are independent of the narrator's understanding of them, but Morrison
certainly exposes the possibility for the opposite to occur. After all, the narrator
theoretically could have told the story in the way she first envisioned it, but Morrison
takes pains to ensure she doesn't in order that no harm is done to the characters/audience.
34 Significantly, Morrison describes the old woman in part by saying that
"among her people she is both the law and its transgression" (10). This echoes the
gnostic text "Thunder, Perfect Mind," whose feminine, divine speaker claims: "I am the
one whom they call Law, and you have called Lawlessness." The woman, Morrison tells
us, is a figure for the practiced author, a connection that gains importance as in Jazz we
contemplate the fact that the novel serves as a metaphor, with the narrator representing
the author (12). The gnostic author/narrator seems central to Morrison's understanding
of the revisionary work to be done with "language," the bird the visitors hold in their
hands (12).
35 Although the majority of references to the speaker in this gnostic text cast her
as feminine-she is the "wife" and the "virgin," the "mother" and the "daughter"-she is
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also a fusion ofopposites and therefore composed of both masculine and feminine
characteristics (297). This is important because, in Jazz, the unnamed narrator is also
never explicitly gendered.
36 In other words, Morrison's answer is "however she prefers."
37 As Martha J. Cutter has pointed out, "Morrison [herselfJ comments in an
interview that the book 'was talking, writing itself, in a sense'" (qtd from Carabi 42).
Critics have commented extensively on Morrison's narrative "Voice" in Jazz, sometimes
referring to the narrator as the Voice of the City, the Voice of Jazz, the Voice of the
Book, or the Voice of the Author. Cutter's "The Story Must Go On: The Fantastic,
Narration, and Intertextuality in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Jazz" gives an overview of
the various stances critics have taken on the Voice in Jazz. Since the novel's gnostic
epigraph encourages these multiple readings and paradoxical perspectives, all these
critics' perspectives on the Voice seem relevant and potentially helpful in understanding
Morrison's complex narrative strategies and the work the text aims to accomplish.
38 Of course, the pressure of articulating the tropes of a largely oral tradition
within a written one generates some of the same tensions and positions as well. See
especially Chapter Four in The SignifYing Monkey for a thorough account of how the
trope ofthe Talking Book functions in African American literary history.
39 These same concerns reappear in the Golden Gray narrative.
40 In other instances in the novel where a shift in speaker occurs, the text is
clearly set apart with quotation marks to distinguish the speaker--except for the narrator,
who receives no such marks. At this moment in Jazz, there has been nothing to indicate
--------------_._.._ ..__ .. ---_.
105
that Violet, instead of the narrator, is speaking, just as there is no change when the novel
moves back to describe Violet's thoughts in the drugstore.
As far as I can tell, only one other exception to this rule occurs (that is, the rule of
direct quotation to distinguish a shift in speaker), and this when the narrator tells the story
of Golden Gray. Here, the text sets apart Golden Gray's thoughts without the use of
direct quotation, presumably because he is thinking, rather than speaking the lines: "Only
now, he thought, now that I have a father, do I feel his absence" (158). The next
paragraph, we assume, continues to follow Golden Gray's thoughts: "Who will take my
part? Soap away the shame? Suds it till it falls away muck at my feet to be stepped out
of? Will he?" (159). However, the "he" of this last line is ambiguous; it may refer to
Golden Gray's father or it may refer to Golden Gray himself, since in the next paragraph,
the narrator is clearly the speaker again. Here, she tells us that "it had rocked him when
he heard who and what his father was," while referring to Golden Gray in the third
person (159). Yet, between these three paragraphs the usual suggestion of a shift in
speaker, shown by the use of direct quotation to set apart the character's speech, is
absent.
41 The fact that Golden Gray is a mixed child of both a white mother and a black
father is another reminder that Morrison is taking pains to present a character that
embodies the paradoxes of opposites introduced in "Thunder, Perfect Mind."
42 But, a complication: although Morrison has already established a connection
between that Violet and the novel's narrator, Joe Trace has some involvement in the story
of Golden Gray as well, despite the fact that at the beginning of the section the narrator
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claims that "[Joe] didn't know" (137). When Golden Gray sets out to kill his father, he
comes across a pregnant, "berry-black woman," whom he rescues somewhat unwillingly.
When she gives birth to a baby boy, she refuses to feed or touch him, and he is taken into
town and given to another family (170). Although the novel never clarifies this point,
(despite critics' claims to the contrary) and Joe himself certainly never knows, there is a
significant chance this woman is his mother-"Wild"-whom his adopted parents tell
him "disappeared without a trace"; hence, the name he gives himself (124). More, this
section also repeats the word "trace" on several occasions, subtle textual hints of a
possible connection between Wild and Joe Trace (171, 176, 178). There is also the
possibility of an intertextual connection to Beloved, since the end of that novel claims "by
and by all trace [of Beloved's footprints] is gone," although-again-this connection is
never made explicit (275). For a discussion ofother intertextual moments in Beloved and
Jazz, see especially Martha J. Cutter's "The Story Must Go On: The Fantastic, Narration,
and Intertextuality in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Jazz" (2000).
What is clear here, however, is that Hunters Hunter (Henry Lestory or Henry Les
Troy) is Golden Gray's father, who is also Joe's mentor and hunting teacher during his
childhood in Virginia, so it is possible that Joe knows at least part of the narrative of
Golden Gray as well as Violet, although presumably they never talked about their shared
past to each other (137). Thus, in a moment ofnarrative ambiguity, when it is uncertain
whether Golden Gray is talking about his father or the narrator is talking about Golden
Gray, the speaker asks "What do I care what the color ofhis skin is, or his contact with
my mother?" (159). Ifthis is the narrator speaking, it may also be Joe speaking in
107
addition to that Violet (whose own mother drowned herself in a well very similar to the
one beside which Golden Gray recovers his sense of self-worth) (emphasis mine, 159,
161). Either way, the narrator's own connection to the story is made explicit. At the
same time, the novel purposefully leaves the narrator's identity ambiguous, here and
elsewhere in the novel. The point seems to be not the certainty ofanyone telling of the
story but its many possibilities and outcomes; the gnostic epigraph, after all, encourages
this multiplicity. Joe and Violet also comprise another set of "opposites" (man and
woman, husband and wife), so to conflate them into one narrator helps to emphasize their
mutuality rather than their independence. For ease of comprehension and in the spirit of
consistency, however, I will continue to refer to the narrator in the feminine, although she
seems to be, more accurately, both male and female-much like the divine speaker of
"Thunder, Perfect Mind."
43 After all, Beloved was also a figure for a larger African American community;
she represented the millions of African Americans who had "died bad" in the institution
of American slavery. Denver also alludes to this metaphorical meaning: "at times I think
she was-more" (314). The fact that Beloved's throat was cut is also a clear analogy to
the literal silencing ofthat population-a silencing continued in Jazz and upheld by the
figure of Wild.
44 When the narrator insists that she was "completely in 'her characters'] hands,"
she foreshadows the novel's final lines and their similar emphasis on hands. In the final
ten pages ofJazz, in fact, the text refers both to the hands of the characters, shaping their
own story, and to the hands of the reader, holding the book "speaking" the story. This
------------------- ._-- -- -
108
emphasis on hands functions to conflate the characters and readers, rewrite the biblical
imagery of Christ's hands as the primary symbol of salvation, and reinforce the gnostic
ideas first introduced by the novel's epigraph.
45 Their relationship with Felice also indicates that, rather than a fruitless
(childless) life, Joe and Violet now have the potential of continuing their own narratives
into the future through Felice, who benefits from this interaction because her own parents
are physically and emotionally absent.
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CHAPTER III
TRANSCENDENT MYTHMAKING:
GNOSTIC SCRIPTURE IN MORRISON'S PARADISE AND
LESLIE MARMON SILKO'S GARDENS IN THE DUNES
Both Toni Morrison and Leslie Mannon Silko undertake a massive revision of the
"master narrative" ofAmerican history-with its concealment of colonialism and
slavery-by retelling that history from suppressed perspectives in Paradise and Gardens
in the Dunes. 1 They do so, in part, through the inclusion of gnostic themes and texts that
valorize the feminine and that emphasize diversity and social equality over homogeneity
and exclusion. In the first two books of the trilogy encompassing Beloved, Jazz, and
Paradise, Morrison transitions from biblical to gnostic revisions to examine invisible
fonns and narrative modes which structure literary production. She continues this earlier
project by incorporating gnostic texts again in Paradise. Like Beloved and Jazz,
Paradise also challenges the racist and patriarchal dimensions of American history and
suggests their roots in nonnative Christian theology; Paradise is particularly concerned
with the history of African America in the latter half of the twentieth century. Similarly,
Leslie Mannon Silko's Gardens in the Dunes relies on gnostic and pre-Christian texts to
develop a feminine epistemology and to scrutinize the effects of colonization on Native
communities. Both authors incorporate gnostic scripture as a counterpoint to patriarchal
Christianity. In contrast to Morrison's project in Paradise, however, which incorporates
the gnostic texts not to reject Christianity but to revise it, Gardens ultimately rejects the
Christian tradition because of its implication in patriarchy and colonialism. Even the
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gnostic texts are significant only inasmuch as they aid Native cultural survival. The
novel is interested in recovering suppressed histories ofmany kinds-gnostic and
traditional, among others-but, most importantly, in revising American history to
foreground Native perspectives and experiences. Although Silko is certainly involved in
a recovery of the suppressed women's histories the gnostic texts represent, in the end she
is primarily concerned with how such histories can be utilized toward the future vitality
of specifically Native communities. Finally, both Morrison and Silko identify the biblical
Garden of Eden as the site of their revisionary work. Utilizing this central biblical
narrative as a structuring metaphor regarding social interactions in the United States,
Morrison and Silko revise the idea of the Garden, or "Paradise," to scrutinize gendered
traditions in both Native and African American literature.
In both Paradise and Gardens, gnostic theology plays itself out through primarily
female characters who possess knowledge of themselves and who use this knowledge to
facilitate both personal and cultural survival. Rather than a God who is wholly other,
some gnostics claimed that "selfknowledge is knowledge of God" and that "the self and
the divine are identical" (Pagels xx)? Morrison and Silko utilize these texts to provide a
historiography that allows the l;.l.S. an alternative "self-knowledge" that carries
implications for social practice. The gnostic poem, "Thunder, Perfect Mind," introduced
in Morrison's Jazz in the previous chapter, appears in both texts for this reason. In it, a
feminine, divine speaker warns against ignorance and encourages an understanding of the
world as a place where opposites exist in balance; to separate or isolate things from their
"opposite" is therefore to exhibit ignorance of the divine. In Paradise, in particular, self-
knowledge likewise leads to divine knowledge (the knowledge of the selfas divine), a
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notion especially threatening to the orthodox, patriarchal community in the novel. In
Gardens, this tension between knowledge and ignorance plays itself out in the contrast
between Native characters whose self-knowledge allows them to control their own
history and colonial characters whose ignorance determines their history for them.
If orthodox scripture has been used to validate patriarchal practice, however, it
has similarly been utilized as a justification for colonialism and slavery in the United
States and around the world. Through their inclusion of gnostic scripture, Morrison and
Silko draw parallels between the oppression of traditional societies in ancient Syria,
Palestine, and Egypt by Alexander the Great and the ensuing Roman Empire and a
history of slavery and colonization in the United States. In doing so, they utilize what
George Lipsitz refers to as "families of resemblance."J In other words, they invite
comparison between seemingly disparate modes of oppression in order to highlight the
way power operates and to acknowledge "similarities in form and content that
transcended surface differences" (150). This may account for some of the appeal of these
gnostic texts to both Morrison and Si1ko. After all, what we know of the gnostic texts is
that they were written by a colonized group of people primarily as a resistance to
oppression. As Karen L. King explains in "Who Are The Gnostics?": "the Gnostic
viewpoint is not that of the victor, but of the conquered and colonized" (15). At the same
time, many gnostic believers were actively involved in material resistance to oppression.
Like Morrison and Silko, these writers often understood the potential for revolutionary
social change through the revision of limiting and destructive cultural myths and
practices; they were poets and authors who believed they had a secret knowledge known
only to a few and that this knowledge had the potential to change history. Not
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surprisingly, in the few centuries after they were written, these gnostic texts were
deemed heretical and were burned, buried, suppressed, and silenced; their recovery at
Nag Hammadi and elsewhere challenges us to reinterpret history at the same time as it
offers the potential for cultural change today (Pagels 69). The choice to incorporate
gnostic texts in Paradise and Gardens helps to locate both novels in a tradition of radical
mythmaking at the same time as it offers a model for the revisionist project each text
undertakes.
If gnostic scripture itself became a way to reject domination, Paradise and
Gardens "uncover" these repressed voices to destabilize the logic ofAmerican
colonialism and slavery, practices motivated by the same "orthodox" perspective that
labeled these ancient texts "heretical.,,4 Transcendent mythmaking in both Paradise and
Gardens serves as a necessary step in the return of the world to its proper balance-
whether that entails a rearticulation ofdifference (Paradise) or resistance to the colonial
presence from the Americas and the possibility of its disappearance (Gardens). Like the
gnostic writers, they also attempt to create new myths as a means of reordering
oppressive social structures. Ultimately, "the people who wrote and read [gnostic] texts
[in their original context understood] themselves [...] as powerful, heroic persons of
superior awareness and infinite self-worth who [were] being degraded, exploited,
deceived, and oppressed by illegitimate forces of domination" (16). What they wanted
was "spiritual development, moral clarity, knowledge, power, and peace" (16). As such,
their story resonates well within the narrative framework of both Paradise and Gardens
in the Dunes.
* * *
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Although she doesn't reject Christianity entirely, the alternative Morrison offers
in Paradise is nothing less than a full-scale revision of nonnative theology through the
inclusion and integration of gnostic scripture suppressed in the fonnation of the early
Christian Church. While Paradise has received less critical attention than either of the
first two novels in the trilogy, scholars have for the most part agreed that the third novel
continues the revision of African American history begun in Beloved and Jazz. As in the
two preceding novels, Paradise explores the narrative modes and cultural practices
inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition at the same time as it calls the authority of
the master narrative of American history into question. Whereas Beloved dealt with
antebellum America and Jazz with the Harlem Renaissance, Paradise takes as its
backdrop the Civil Rights movement and the period of black nationalism in the 1960s and
1970s.5 In particular, it investigates patriarchy and the self-conscious strategy of
isolation central to the concerns of the Black Power movement and invokes the still-
current debate surrounding the question of integration. In Paradise, Morrison challenges
separatist ideologies that romanticize communities based on isolation and exclusion-
even when that isolation is a response to racial violence-by linking these ideologies to
biblical utopian narratives and calling attention to their inherently patriarchal and
hierarchical nature. More significantly, she illustrates the dangers inherent when people
internalize the same values they seek to escape. The gnostic scripture Morrison posits as
an alternative emphasizes diversity and balance over isolation and exclusion; the novel
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argues that violent history perpetuates itself if it fails to revise limiting and
destructive myths and cultural practices that motivate them.
Paradise depicts the all-black town, Ruby, whose citizens are proud, confident,
and self-sufficient, traits they equate with racial purity. They are a community ofAfrican
Americans isolated from the white world, but purity and isolation become the
justification for the violence they enact on five women living in a nearby house referred
to as the "Convent." Although the "Paradise" of the novel's title refers most obviously to
a biblical heaven, a haven (and a place of peace) that is the reward for the Christian
faithful, the novel undermines the logic of this kind of formulation-based on
exclusion-and reveals its destructive and violent potential. The Ruby community is
fashioned in accordance with this biblical model as an earthly "paradise" for its African
American inhabitants, men and women who seek a haven for themselves in a country
premised on violence toward them. Despite the fact that proponents of black nationalism
historically rejected Christianity, the novel makes a pointed comparison between their
isolationist politics and the utopian logic of exclusion derived from Christian theology,
and it suggests that such theology is the root of Ruby's problems. In Paradise,
Christianity remains the driving force behind the Ruby community; the town's patriarchs,
Deacon and Steward Morgan, have names that reflect the nature of their authority and
indicate their church-sanctioned position.6 Family and church authority in Ruby also
mirrors biblical authority: the men govern and lead, while the women support and
encourage the men (1 Corinthians 11: 3, Ephesians 5: 22).
Not surprisingly, these men are deeply invested in protecting their way of life, and
they view any aberration from the norm as a risk to their safety. After all, their
- ---------------------
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experience in the past has taught them that survival means isolating themselves with
people who are the same as they are. The problem arises when Ruby's politics (and the
faith they reflect) become stagnant, inflexible to change, and unable to deal with
differences amongst them; arguments between the older and younger generations,
contention between men and women concerning gender roles, babies born with physical
defects from consanguineous marriages, and rivalry between the town's churches are just
a few of the very serious problems the Ruby community faces. When a group of
nontraditional women from diverse backgrounds takes up residence in a "Convent" on
the outskirts of town, the men find their difference an easy scapegoat for the problems
they see within their own community. So it happens that, on a clear morning in July,
1976, nine gunmen from Ruby surprise, surround, and kill (the unarmed) Consolata,
Pallas, Mavis, Gigi, and Seneca.
The male-centered community of Ruby and the violence it inspires evoke two sets
of early American patriarchs, both ofwhom helped to "author" the master narrative of
American history Morrison challenges. The first group ofmen the Ruby community calls
to mind are the nation's "Founding Fathers"-those men who organized in some way the
establishment of the American democracy. The date of the Convent women's murders,
however-the United States' bicentennial-is a pointed reminder of the failure of the
new nation to tolerate difference, especially in its Native and African populations.
Paradise illustrates how the Ruby community has internalized this national logic and
manifested the same intolerance toward outsiders that was first aimed at them. Peter
Widdowson has argued that the novel's "black sub-textual invocation of the [Founding
Fathers] reinflect[s] the American Dream-seeking a pure polity and freedom from a
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corrupt past in the [New World]-and its failure" (319).7 Like the Founding Fathers,
proponents of black nationalism historically sought to separate African American
communities from the harmful influence of mainstream, white America. In addition to
this separatist impulse, and despite the fact that there were many important benefits to
arise from black nationalism, the movement also maintained purist politics that excluded
African American women entirely or relegated them to stereotypically feminine roles.8
Eldridge Cleaver's notorious formulation, which involved "practicing [rape] on black
girls in the ghetto" in preparation for an assault on the real enemy, is a clear example of
the patriarchal politics of the Black Power movement-politics derived largely from the
logic of exclusion inherited from the Founding Fathers and applied to black women (14).
Linking the failure ofpatriarchal Ruby (and the period of African American history it
represents) to the failure ofthe American democratic experiment more broadly,
Widdowson's work is representative of the large majority of work being done on
Paradise.
In the text, however, Morrison also challenges another master history--one
corresponding to the story of the "Founding Fathers" and having a similar, violent effect
on the men of Ruby. These second American "Fathers" evoked by the Ruby community
are the Puritans, and they help to clarify how Morrison uses the biblical imagery and
allusion that abounds in the text. At the same time, they introduce another part of the
master narrative in need of revision: biblical scripture that justifies violence motivated by
a fear of difference. As Katrine Dalsgard has pointed out, there are clear parallels
between the establishment of Ruby in Paradise and the first Puritan colonies in the New
World.9 After all, Puritan belief in the "Promised Land" of God's chosen people (and
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their persecution in and "Exodus" away from the Old World) does resonate with the
idea of utopia the citizens of Ruby seek (and their "Disallowing" by other black
communities).lo It also alludes to a common theme in African American discourse of
blacks as a chosen people seeking freedom in a foreign land; the analogy of the
enslavement of Israel in Egypt is even more fitting when applied to the enslavement of
blacks in America. Since the Ruby community parallels the Puritan colonies in this way,
the violence the men resort to in the novel can also be read as a repetition of the failure of
the Puritan Fathers to tolerate difference, and the Convent shootings become another
detestable witch hunt. Ultimately, the narrative of Ruby's men illustrates the novel's
position regarding the actions ofboth sets ofAmerican "Fathers" and the historical
process they initiated: unless something is done to change the cultural myths that inspire
this kind of violence, the failures of American history (and any similar attempts to
establish "paradise" on earth) are doomed to repeat themselves.
Yet the story of Ruby, and particularly the story of its male citizens, is not the
only narrative in Paradise. To amend these historical failures, Morrison posits an
alternative to the patriarchal Christian community of Ruby that critiques the destructive
theology they embrace. In fact, just sixteen miles outside of Ruby, a group of unruly
women undergo a radical transformation in a "Convent."l1 But, before we learn about
their transformation or about their lives at all, Consolata, Mavis, Gigi, Seneca, and Pallas
are gunned down in the first chapter; the novel then presents their stories in succeeding
chapters named after each one. From the beginning, the women at the Convent are seen
as outsiders to the Ruby inhabitants and are viewed with suspicion. After all, they grow
the hottest peppers in Oklahoma (which, according to the Ruby men, is clearly evidence
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of devilry) and take in drunks and runaway mothers. In fact, unlike Ruby's
patriarchs, they exclude no one (male or female, from any racial background). While
each woman likewise arrives shouldering the burden of a violent and traumatic personal
history, she resists Ruby's impulse to isolate from those who are different from them: all
the women live in a community (sharing tasks, tending to the garden, cooking), but have
their own space and are free to come and go as they choose. 12 Rather than the
exclusively male leadership found in Ruby-based on biblical models of authority-
another major distinction between the two communities is that the latter is a space where
gender roles have been reversed; in the Convent, the women maintain authority, lead, and
govern themselves. Most significant in terms of the novel's work to contrast the Convent
women with Ruby's patriarchs, however, is the women's transformation just before the
men come to hunt them down. After their deaths, the women are introduced again at the
end, persisting in a middle world between life and death that can best be described as
"paradise," although the novel insists that such a place differs vastly from the utopia
sought by the "Founding Fathers," the Puritans, or even the inhabitants of Ruby. In this
new formulation of "paradise," the novel claims the women have important "work to do"
(318).
While a few critics understand the Convent women as consistent with Morrison's
use of biblical imagery and allusion in the rest ofthe novel, most critics have simply
chosen to ignore the novel's enigmatic ending entirely.13 Ana Maria Fraile-Marcos, for
example, reads Consolata as a Christ figure who offers salvation to her followers in New
Testament fashion and who is in stark contrast with Ruby's version of the Old Testament
Father God, but she glosses over the novel's mysterious ending. 14 She argues that, after
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the women's purification, and before their deaths, the Convent "turn[s] itself into a
paradise for the women living there, demonstrating that improvement relies on the
visibility of change and fluidity that the men in Ruby eschew" (23-4). Although Fraile-
Marcos' emphasis on change and fluidity is apt, neither her nor other critics' explanations
are entirely convincing in light of the transformation the women undergo in Paradise or
their death and reappearance in the coda, largely because such interpretations overlook
the novel's gnostic epigraph. My own work with Paradise draws on this earlier
scholarship but focuses on the epigraph to situate the Convent women on the outskirts of
orthodox Christianity (also represented by their geographical distance from Ruby's
patriarchal Christian community). Rather than locate the Convent women within the
Christian tradition, I argue, these ten lines expose the work the novel does to challenge
notions of utopia based on exclusion.
An understanding of the epigraph itself and its function in the text clarifies
Morrison's purpose in rewriting the gnostic poem, "Thunder, Perfect Mind," as an way to
rewrite to normative, patriarchal Christian theology and to revision the role of difference
in any formulation, fictional or factual, of "paradise." In contrast to the exclusively male
leadership of Ruby, all the Convent inhabitants are women; this is significant because it
aligns them with the feminine, divine speaker of "Thunder, Perfect Mind," a character
who possesses an important insight concerning the relationship of the soul to the world
around it. One of the women living in the Convent is even named "Divine." This
alignment rewrites women as spiritual leaders, a role not traditionally assigned them in
patriarchal society, and it revises the concept of the divine to include feminine
characteristics. The final ten lines of "Thunder, Perfect Mind" appear as the novel's
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epigraph, and they serve as both a warning against "pleasant forms" of ignorance and
a hope for a permanent state of understanding, or gnosis:
For many are the pleasant forms which exist in
numerous SIllS,
and inconsistencies,
and disgraceful passions,
and fleeting pleasures,
which (men) embrace until they become sober
and go up to their resting-place.
And they will find me there,
and they will live,
and they will not die again. (Paradise xiii)
Translators have inserted the term "(men)" in "Thunder, Perfect Mind" to refer to all
people, male and female, who have not "found" the feminine, divine speaker and who,
therefore, do not possess the ability to "live, / and [...] not die again." By contrast, this
lack of knowledge is something both the speaker and the second-person, "you," have
overcome; hence, both the speaker and the audience have a secret knowledge that sets
them apart from "men," who lack knowledge. In Paradise, Morrison plays on the
translator's insertion, "(men)," denying its generic reference and pitting the men of Ruby
against the Convent women.
The "sobriety" men can attain only through gnosis (and which leads to the
discovery ofthe feminine, divine speaker) reflects a characteristically gnostic use of
symbolic language. For some gnostics, the metaphor of intoxication illustrates man's
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state of "drunkenness" in the world. In The Gnostic Religion, Hans Jonas argues that
drunkenness
is induced by the "wine of ignorance" [...], which the world everywhere
proffers to man. The metaphor makes it clear that ignorance is not a
neutral state, the mere absence ofknowledge, but is itself a positive
counter-condition to that of knowledge, actively induced and maintained
to prevent it. The ignorance of drunkenness is the soul's ignorance of
itself, its origin, and its situation in the alien world. (71)
For the gnostic, "the soul's ignorance of itself, its origin, and its situation in the
alien world" is the single, greatest risk facing the believer, since many gnostics
claimed that "to know oneself [...] is to know human nature and human destiny"
(Pagels xix). In Paradise, it is clear that the men ofRuby are "drunk" with
ignorance of themselves, their origin, and their relationship to the damaging logic
motivating American (and African American) history. The Convent women, on
the other hand, are working hard to obtain gnosis. In the end, they do obtain it-
which explains their uncanny ability to "live, / [...] and not die again" when they
reappear in the novel's coda. In other words, through self-knowledge they have
become divine.
The majority of this nearly 250-line poem is devoted to self-naming and self-
knowledge. This is a speaker who is not intoxicated by the wine of ignorance offered by
the world. In fact, unlike "(men)," the feminine, divine speaker of "Thunder, Perfect
Mind" knows herself as a complex fusion of opposites:
For I am the first and the last.
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r am the honored one and the scorned one.
r am the whore and the holy one.
r am the wife and the virgin.
r am the mother and the daughter.
[...}
r am the bride and the bridegroom. (12-16,24)
The paradoxical speaker encompasses all things, great and small, masculine and
feminine, elevated and base. She is both "compassionate" and "cruel," "an alien and a
citizen," "war and peace" (68, 156, 55). This unity of opposites at work in the divine is
also at work in the poem in "you," the audience (later referred to as angels and spirits),
implying that "you" will become divine when "you" come to know "yourself' wholly.
The healing that the Convent women undergo under Consolata's tutelage is a clear
example of such self-transformation. By painting their outlines on the cement floor of
the Convent cellar, Mavis, Seneca, Gigi, and Pallas create their "opposite," a twin image
of themselves and one that houses all their past trauma so that they can be free of it. The
Convent women come to "know" themselves once they embrace both their negative and
positive selves, and this knowledge, in turn, leads to an understanding of their inherent
divinity. is
The idea of opposites existing in union is not new to Morrison; as early as 1974,
she claimed that African American authors were "focusing on a peculiar way [...] Black
people experience evil and deal with [it]" (qtd. in Taylor-Guthrie 8). Speaking of a
distinctly African American way of "seeing" (i.e. "knowing"), Morrison claimed that
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Black people never annihilate evil. They don't run it out of their
neighborhoods, chop it up, or bum it up. They don't have witch hangings.
They accept it. It's almost like a fourth dimension in their lives. They try
to protect themselves from evil, ofcourse, but they don't have that
puritanical thing which says if you see a witch, then bum it. (8)
Twenty years later, exceptions to this are the "8-rock" men ofRuby, who seek to purge
evil from their community both by excommunicating those whose skin tone is too light
and by shooting the Convent women, whose horne they view as "the devil's bedroom,
bathroom, and his nasty playpen" (17). In flight from white and black racists who
persecuted them for being different, these men now seek to destroy difference. They are
the "men" of the epigraph who lack knowledge of the divine. Morrison contrasts these
two communities in the novel to call attention to the flawed national logic that compels
the men of Ruby. The "unity of opposites" proposed by the feminine, divine speaker of
"Thunder, Perfect Mind" replaces the stagnant, social and spiritual policies of the Ruby
community and encourages diversity and inclusion as prerequisites to personal (and
historical) salvation.
Toward these revisionist ends, and to emphasize balance as an alternative to
exclusion, Paradise also foregrounds pairs of opposites. Several sets oftwins appear in
the novel. Beyond the "twin" images of the women in the Convent cellar, there are at
least three sets of twins in the novel: the babies, Merle and Pearl; the brothers, Steward
and Deacon Morgan; and their ancestors, Coffee and Tea. 16 The story surrounding
Coffee and Tea, especially, expresses the idea of a necessary unity of opposites as
suggested by "Thunder, Perfect Mind." More to the point, the story of Coffee and Tea
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shows the negative potential of separating two "opposites" which are meant to exist
together:
One day [...] when he and his twin brother were walking near a saloon,
some whitemen, amused by the double faces, encouraged the brothers to
dance. Since the encouragement took the form of a pistol, Tea, quite
reasonably, accommodated the whites, even though he was a grown man,
older than they were. Coffee took a bullet in his foot instead. From that
moment they weren't brothers anymore. Coffee began to plan a new life
elsewhere. (302)
Coffee is, of course, Steward and Deacon's grandfather; rejecting his accommodating,
lighter-skinned brother and looking for his "new life elsewhere" initiates the search for an
all-black "haven.,,17 Richard Misner suggests that such separation of opposites is due to a
"lack of forgiveness. Lack of love," and he emphasizes the necessity of maintaining a
unity of opposites by reminding Deacon that "[losing] a brother is a hard thing. To
choose to lose one, well, that's worse than the original shame, wouldn't you say?" (303).
By the end of the novel, Deacon understands the necessity of reconciling with his twin,
who has become his "opposite," even as he realizes that he has "a long way to go" (303).
But he is the only man among the nine gunmen who acknowledges this.
Steward, in particular, resists the difference the Convent women represent and
considers their actions unorthodox and heretical. In fact, he goes as far as to "[stop] them
dead lest they know another realm," but he is simply too late (301). By the time the men
arrive at the Convent, the women have already undergone a transformation that has led to
their divinity. The novel presents their transformation in a way that resonates with
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Christian conceptions of salvation and rebirth through faith in Jesus Christ, but it
rewrites the master scripture to posit other paths to personal salvation. Consolata
instigates the women's transformation, and she serves as their leader and teacher
throughout the process. Although everyone in the novel calls her Connie, she gives her
full name as Consolata, meaning "consolation" in Portuguese. Interestingly, in the
Bentley Layton translation of "Thunder, Perfect Mind," the feminine, divine speaker says
that she is "consolation: of [her] own travail" (26). The Robinson version translates the
word as "solace." Consolata is the character in Paradise most like the feminine, divine
speaker of "Thunder, Perfect Mind," especially at first. She offers solace throughout the
novel to the four girls living with her in the Convent; however, before she becomes their
teacher, Consolata undergoes her own transformation from a drunk living in the darkness
of the Convent's cellar to a "Revised Reverend Mother" practicing what she formally
condemned as "magic" but now calls "in sight," a word synonymous with gnosis (247).18
The "darkness" of the cellar indicates another gnostic metaphor for the ignorance of the
world, and her ascent from the cellar to the main floor parallels gnostic imagery of the
soul's ascent to knowledge of the "world of light" which represents salvation through
gnosis (Jonas 80).19 The climax of Consolata's own transformation comes when she
meets the stranger whose eyes are the color of green apples, the same color hers were
before they faded. Likewise, they both have "tea-colored" hair, and he speaks her first
language (223, 252).20 Like Consolata, he is wearing sunglasses, although his are
described as "the mirror type" (252). Morrison's emphasis on mirroring and reflection,
along with the similarities between the two characters, indicates that this man is
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Consolata's "opposite," or "twin"-the knowledge of which "Thunder, Perfect Mind"
asserts leads to salvation.
As soon as she "knows" the stranger, her "opposite," Consolata's transformation
is complete; she takes over in her role of spiritual guide and begins preparations for a
meal the women share before they descend to the cellar and emerge "reborn." In a
significant moment of scriptural revision, Paradise simultaneously rewrites two key
Christian concepts: "the fall" as the site of original sin and faith in the Savior, Jesus
Christ, as the only path to salvation. In the novel's revised version, Eve becomes not the
bearer of evil but the messenger ofgnosis; this revision is significant because it positions
women as the messengers of true faith at the same time as it marks the beginning of the
Convent women's own gnosis-a self-knowledge that will lead to their transformation
and "rebirth" and, ultimately, to their divinity.21 To begin with, the "apples" used to
describe the color of the stranger's eyes reappear in the meal Consolata prepares for the
five women.22 These apples, of course, evoke an image ofthe biblical Garden of Eden,
where Eve first ate the apple ofthe tree ofknowledge of good and evil and then offered it
to Adam; this is the passage used most often to justify patriarchal Christianity'S
suppression of the rights ofwomen, since it was Eve who sinned first by eating the
forbidden fruit. After all, God gave Adam the authority to "rule over [Eve]" as a result of
this original sin (Genesis 3: 16). For many gnostics, however, this biblical scene was of
particular interest because of its emphasis on "knowledge," and the conclusions they
drew were antithetical to Christian teachings on original sin. Rather than the site of Eve's
sin, the Garden for many gnostics marked, instead, a success: "the beginning of all gnosis
on earth which thus by its very origin is stamped as opposed to the world and its God,
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and indeed as a form of rebellion" (Jonas 93). In other words, by serving apples as a
part of her meal, Consolata offers the women the "knowledge" this fruit represents. In
terms of the novel's historical revision, Morrison amends the destructive logic of "the
fall" and rewrites it to include suppressed perspectives that valorize, rather than condemn,
the feminine.
Through the figure of Consolata, Paradise also revises the Christian concept of
the Savior and faith in the teachings of Christ as the only path to salvation. Instead, the
novel suggests the gnostic concept of self-knowledge as a means to salvation as a viable
alternative. In this formulation, Christ leads and teaches, but the individual attains her
own salvation through internal transformation. More significantly, this transformation
leads to an understanding of divine reality, and according to certain gnostic formulations,
"whoever perceives divine reality 'becomes what he sees'" (Pagels 134). In other words,
"whoever achieves gnosis becomes 'no longer a Christian, but a Christ'" (134). In
Paradise, the women's self-knowledge leads to knowledge of the divine, which in turn
leads to their own divinity. Following this logic, it makes sense to read Consolata as a
kind of Christ figure in Paradise, as Fraile-Marcos has argued. The novel, however,
radically revises the concept of the teacher, or Savior, in Christian theology at the same
time as it ultimately renders church authority unnecessary.23 While Consolata leads the
women's transformation at first, in the end her authority is replaced by the power of the
women themselves, who are the authors of their own salvation. Echoing Jesus' words to
his disciples at the Sea of Galilee, she insists the women "follow [her] ," but she
immediately qualifies her statement by adding, enigmatically, "someone could want to
meet you" (262). That someone is not Consolata but each girl's "opposite"; revising the
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biblical concept of the Savior puts power into the hands of those who have
historically felt most powerless.
In Paradise, an exploration of personal and historical experience leads to an
understanding of divine reality and rewrites Christian conceptions of salvation and rebirth
as only possible through faith in Jesus Christ. As previously noted, self-knowledge is the
soul's knowledge "of itself, its origin, and its situation in the alien world." In terms of
the Convent women's transformation, then, it is imperative that each woman revisit her
own personal history before she can be saved and move forward. By contrast, the gnostic
text "The Book of Thomas the Contender" claims: "whoever has not known himself has
known nothing"; the incongruity between the Convent women and the men of Ruby on
this point is striking (qtd. in Pagels 134). Thus begins the "loud dreaming" in the
Convent's cellar, where each girl lies naked in her outline on the cold floor, symbolizing
the uniting of each one with her "opposite" so that she can know herself and become
who1e.24 This internal transformation makes salvation primarily a personal experience
and renders church authority meaningless in the process. Once in the cellar, the four
women are led in a ritual re-enactment of their personal histories in a way that alludes to
gnostic conceptions of rebirth and transformation through gnosis and the soul's ascent
back to its true home, and it rewrites those histories with each woman as the author,
rather than victim, of her own narrative. History becomes, in these women's experience,
something they can control and fashion, rather than being forced upon them without their
consent. Seneca, for instance, recognizes the outline as an extension of herself; she
"duplicated in robin's egg blue one of her more elegant scars [...J. Later on, when she
had the hunger to slice her inner thigh, she chose instead to mark the open body lying on
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the cellar floor" (265). Jonas explains that, for the gnostic who encounters her
"opposite," "the recognition of it as [her] own image, and the reunion with it signify the
real moment of [her] salvation" (122). By the time the women ascend the cellar steps and
dance in the rain, they are described as "holy women," as '!divine" as both Consolata and
the feminine speaker of "Thunder, Perfect Mind" (283). As Jonas explains, "this is the
good end ofthose who have attained gnosis: to become God" (153). However, such a
radical transformation is only possible when difference ("opposites") is accepted and
celebrated. Morrison's message is that African Americans need to revisit (i.e. "know")
their own history before they will be able to amend the destructive logic at the root of its
failures.
When she first sees the women after their transformation and "rebirth," Soane
comments on "how calmly themselves they seemed," adding that they "were no longer
haunted" (266). The "hunting" that follows, then, although it serves to indict the Ruby
community, actually has little effect on the five Convent women. The novel indicates
that three of the women "went down [...] in the grass" after they were shot, and the men
assume they've been killed (290). Soane, Dovey, and Lone believe that the two other
women have died; they close Consolata's eyes and cover her up with a sheet just after
Dovey comes in to report that "the white girl" is "gone" (291). The word "gone" has a
double meaning, however, as the novel soon makes clear. Dovey uses it to mean that
"the white girl" is dead, but when Roger Best "gunned the motor of the ambulancelhearse
and sped to the Convent" to pick up the bodies, he found nothing (292). More surprising
still, "even the Cadillac was gone.,,25 The women seem to have simply disappeared;
Lone deduces that God "had actually swept up and received His servants in broad
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daylight," and Richard Misner concludes that they've gone to "another place-neither
death nor life-" (298,307). The novel's epigraph, however, suggests that the place is
actually something more along the lines of an earthly "paradise" that encompasses both
death and life and is therefore a combination of the opposites that comprise the paradox
of "Thunder, Perfect Mind"; it is also clearly a revision of the biblical formulation of
"paradise" based on exclusion. Ultimately, though, the violence of the men of Ruby has
no lasting effect on the Convent women because they are "holy," and their divinity makes
them invulnerable to the violence of the mortal world.
This divinity explains the women's reappearance in the coda, yet it shouldn't be
mistaken as a justification for Ruby's violence. Lone may be correct in thinking that
"God had given Ruby a second chance," but the novel makes it clear that the murder of
the Convent women leads to the dissolution of the entire Ruby community and the
utopian impulse it represents. Paradise thus calls into question both the racist and sexist
dimensions of the master narrative of American history and the self-destructive theology
internalized by the men of Ruby and proponents of the historical Black Power
movement-whose purist politics figured black women as a threat to African American
virility (Ford 178-79).26 Morrison therefore rewrites harmful elements of the Judeo-
Christian tradition to incorporate an other, expressly gnostic epistemology that sees
difference as integral to wholeness. Her reconception of "Paradise" is first and foremost
be based on inclusivity, so when the women reappear in the coda, they embody opposites.
They are alive though they were dead; they are both human and spirit; two tote weapons,
three are weaponless; one embraces an old woman, one a baby. They come from racially
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diverse backgrounds. All five move through spaces they inhabited in the past while
focused on a future goal.
The novel's final line emphasizes the work yet to be done: "Now they will rest
before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise" (318,
emphasis mine). Like the feminine, divine speaker of "Thunder, Perfect Mind," the
women have come armed with a message ofgnosis that argues that God and the self are
identical and that "paradise" is "down here." In this self-reflexive final line, Morrison
refers to her own creation of these mythical characters and acknowledges that she, too, is
shouldering her revisionist work down here in paradise. Ultimately, Paradise makes it
clear that a revision of the master narrative of American history and its cultural myths
gives African Americans the power both to author their own history and to shape their
future. Without this kind of revision, and despite the best of intentions, violent history
merely repeats itself.
* * *
If Paradise invokes the gnostic gospels in order to scrutinize the racist and
patriarchal dimensions of African American and American history, Leslie Marmon
Silko's Gardens in the Dunes relies on these texts to develop a feminine epistemology
that serves as a counterpoint to the Judeo-Christian tradition that justifies U.S.
colonialism. Like Paradise, Gardens in the Dunes incorporates gnostic texts and themes,
especially those affirming feminine authority in the early church, and Silko even cites a
section of the same gnostic poem used in Morrison's epigraph. But Gardens is less
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concerned with revising orthodox Christianity through its inclusion of these texts than
it is interested in encouraging an alternative worldview entirely. Silko's use of the
gnostic texts in Gardens facilitates this goal by first destabilizing the authority of a
singular, master narrative of American history that promotes colonialism and suppresses
all systems of belief not adhering to its fundamental tenets. In the novel, scriptural and
historical revision go hand in hand and enable a retelling of American history and
colonialism from a Native epistemological framework in a way that affirms alternative
narratives. Of course, the ultimate goal is not merely narrative, but also social, revision.
In Silko's formulation, such an alternative incorporates elements of several belief
systems, including Celtic and Roman mythology, Native American cosmogony, and
ancient goddess and fertility myths, as well as the gnostic texts themselves. By drawing
parallels between all these systems of belief, the novel exposes the intersections (in
addition to the more obvious disconnections) between disparate ideas, people, and places.
More significantly, this cultural syncretism ultimately becomes part of a strategy for
Native survival in Gardens. To date, no critical attention has been given to the
incorporation of pre-Christian and gnostic texts in the novel.
Criticizing the history and effects of colonialism on Native people and the land
they inhabit is the primary goal of Gardens, which traces the story of two Colorado River
Indian sisters from the fictional Sand Lizard tribe.27 Although at the outset of the novel
the tribe appears to be in danger of extinction, Gardens troubles this myth of the
"disappearing" Native by emphasizing the sisters' survival. Set at the turn ofthe
twentieth century, the novel follows Indigo and Sister Salt on a cyclical journey that ends
where it begins: in the "gardens in the dunes." The family gardens where Sister Salt and
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Indigo begin and end their story are located in a remote spot in the American
southwest accessible only by foot. There they learn from Grandma Fleet how to subsist
on seeds (which they plant in and harvest from the terraced gardens), dried fruit, and
occasional game, and to respect the other inhabitant of the dunes, old Grandfather Snake.
When Grandma Fleet dies of old age and the two sisters go into town looking for food,
they are seized by Indian police and separated; Sister Salt is sent to a nearby reservation
and Indigo to the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California. The rest of the novel traces
both sisters' attempts to return to their home in the gardens in the dunes. After leaving
the reservation, for example, Sister Salt finds work at a nearby dam project and works to
save enough money to return. As soon as she can, Indigo escapes the boarding school
and seeks refuge in a garden near an orange grove. In this garden, she meets Linnaeus, a
monkey who befriends her, and his owners, Hattie and Edward Palmer, who become her
temporary guardians. Thus begins a series of encounters with gardens of all sizes and
styles. "Rescued" by Hattie and Edward, Indigo is whisked off on a tour of American
and European homes and gardens that exposes buried and suppressed histories and belief
systems. Each garden on the journey introduces another epistemological framework,
which works in conjunction with the gnostic texts to destabilize the authority of the
master narrative of Christianity and U.S. colonialism.
Edward and Hattie Palmer are the novel's central colonial figures, and their
relationship illustrates different kinds of complicity in the colonial project. Repeating a
U.S. history of collecting Native artifacts and even Native people themselves, Edward in
particular is fascinated with classifying and collecting "specimens" of everything he
encounters. His special interest is botany, and the plants he attains wherever he travels-
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the jungles of Brazil, the Gulf ofMexico, or the American southwest-are witness to
the effects of colonialism on the global geography. As Silko has observed in an
interview: "everywhere the colonials went, the plants came back from there" (Arnold 20).
Edward's impulse to collect even extends to his encounter with Indigo. Almost
immediately, he sees her as a specimen in need of classification: he begins "to search
through his library for ethnological reports on the desert Indians" and is "intrigued with
the notion that the child might be the last remnant of a tribe now extinct, perhaps a tribe
. never before studied by anthropologists" (113). Edward's self-interested acquisitiveness
is countered by Hattie, who sees Indigo not as an artifact from a now-extinct tribe, but as
a human being (l08). However, Hattie's complicity in the colonial project is made clear
when she insists Indigo accompany them on their trip east and refuses to let Indigo return
to her home in the dunes. The novel also makes it apparent that Hattie wants a child and
would like to adopt Indigo. This, of course, is a type of acquisitiveness and control that
merely repeats dominant colonial dynamics of paternalism-Natives were frequently
likened to children in "need" of governmental "care" and control. Thus, while Hattie is
certainly well intentioned, she is nonetheless also implicated in the history ofAmerican
colonialism Gardens recounts, if less obviously than her husband. By the end of the
novel, her presence becomes more explicitly disruptive and even harmful to the survival
of the Native community.
Many of the specific concerns facing the Native world at the turn ofthe century
are echoed in the sisters' stories and, when told from their perspective, function to rewrite
the master narrative ofAmerican history by uncovering suppressed Native histories and
experiences. The story of Sister Salt and Indigo, then, represents a much broader history
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of American colonialism and the military conquest ofNative America Silko rewrites
in the novel. Each sister's story reenacts part of this history:
the military campaign against Natives dispossessed them of their lands and
confined them to reservations, a history [Gardens] repeats in Sister Salt's
story. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the federal government
then began its attempts to assimilate the survivors, in part through the
boarding school policy, and Indigo's story reenacts this part of the
conquest. (Huhndorf 190)
Silko rewrites the history ofNative America in a way that emphasizes the destructive
consequences of federal policies on Native people. In the months Indigo is at the
Sherman Institute, for example, she "watched three girls from Alaska stop eating, lie
listlessly in their beds, then die, coughing blood" (Gardens 70). These histories,
purposefully silenced in conventional colonial narratives, are uncovered in the novel to
foreground the violence of the conquest (Huhndorf 190). Silko also illustrates the effects
of colonialism on the land itself: the dam project Sister Salt works at after she leaves the
reservation rewrites the particular history of the American southwest by emphasizing the
flooding ofNative lands and the diversion of water from sacred places caused by federal
dam-building initiatives in the early twentieth century. Even as it highlights the
consequences of colonialism on Native people and the geographical landscape, however,
Gardens also emphasizes Native methods of resistance and survival: "although Indigo is
plagued by death, poverty, and tragic loss, she tells the story of a Native person's survival
in a changing world" (190). This revision ofthe history of U.S. colonialism is the
primary goal of the novel, and it is aided, in part, by parallel revisions of biblical
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scripture, all of which serve in the text as reminders of the intersections between
sacred and political history. Through its incorporation of scriptural revision, the novel
emphasizes a capacity for native survival at the same time as it counters Edward's
colonial perspective that views Indigo as the "last remnant" of a now-extinct tribe.
Silko emphasizes historical and scriptural revision as a mode of resistance against
a dominating, colonial perspective through the novel's reenactment of the historical
Ghost Dance, an anti-colonial movement in the late-nineteenth century that incorporated
into itself elements of Christian theology (like an apocalyptic return of the Messiah) as a
subversive act; although they adopted aspects of Christianity, the ghost dancers did so in
a way that called attention to the violence of the conquest and redefined the players in the
biblical struggle between good and evil in the colonial context. Syncretic in nature,
Wovoka the Prophet nonetheless advocated a rejection ofall things European. In fact,
the Ghost Dance movement ultimately "imagined nothing less than the end ofcolonial
relations" and the disappearance of the colonial presence from the Americas (Ostler 262).
Government efforts to suppress the movement culminated in the Wounded Knee
massacre of 1890. In Gardens, Wounded Knee has already happened before the narrative
begins: "far to the north there were rumors the soldiers killed dozens of dancers" (24).
In the novel, the Ghost Dance appears twice, once at the beginning and once at the
novel's culmination. At the beginning of Gardens, Grandma Fleet and the sisters'
mother are part of a fictional offshoot of the historical movement. By beginning the
novel's narrative after Wounded Knee, Silko emphasizes Native vitality despite dominant
narratives that suggest Native American history officially ended in 1890.
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In Gardens, Grandma and the other women join the participants of the Ghost
Dance outside of the colonial town ofNeedles, and on the fourth day of dancing and
being visited by the ancestors, the Messiah and his eleven children appear. Congruent
with accounts of the historical Ghost Dance, the novel claims that "Jesus was very angry
with white people" and prophesies their downfall and ultimate disappearance at the event
(25). This first Ghost Dance is ultimately unsuccessful, however; the Messiah appears
but the colonial presence does not disappear; when soldiers and Indian police break up
the dance, Sister Salt and Indigo escape to the gardens in the dunes. It is this colonial
presence, and the oppressive ideologies attached to it-especially patriarchy and
racism-that the girls will flee until the return of the Ghost Dance at the end of the novel.
After this first dance, however, Grandma Fleet returns to the gardens after several days,
without Mama, who "follow[ed] the tracks in the sand made by the Messiah and his
family" (46). The mystery of her disappearance and her symbolic return to the dunes at
the novel's end, once again in conjunction with the Ghost Dance, parallels the sisters'
own cyclical journey and their successful attempt to rid their lives of the oppression of
colonialism. The novel's emphasis on alternative experiences of the Messiah (for
example, witness of his multiple appearances in the Americas and around the world in the
nineteenth century) calls into question the authority of the master narrative of orthodox
Christianity and the Church's assertion of its as the only, "true" faith. By including the
Ghost Dance as a feature of Sister Salt and Indigo's narrative, Silko reiterates the anti-
colonial message of the historical Ghost Dance itself, which predicts the disappearance of
the colonial presence at the same time as it provides a program for Native survival.
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Along with the historical Ghost Dance, which revised elements of colonialist
culture as a subversive act and as a means of cultural survival, Gardens incorporates
gnostic (and, later in the narrative, pre-Christian) texts as a mode of resistance against a
dominating, patriarchal perspective. Gardens incorporates the gnostic texts in the same
way the Ghost Dance adopted elements of Christianity-in the service of Native survival
first and foremost-and as part of a syncretic cultural practice that resists static and
essentialist notions of identity locked in the historical past. In the case of the Ghost
Dance, the incorporation of Christian scripture equated with survival because it meant
colonists continued to allow the meetings and dancing to occur. More significantly, by
revising the Christian notion of apocalypse and the second coming of Christ, it also
supplied a narrative to utilize in support of their own survival. In this way, the Ghost
Dance stood in stark contrast with the colonial perspective, represented by Edward,
which assumed Native disappearance and considered Indians as "specimens" from a
now-defunct past. Like the incorporation of Christian texts into the historical Ghost
Dance, the gnostic texts in revised form also provide narratives for the sisters of how to
survive in the gardens in the dunes (respecting the Grandfather Snake, among other
inclusive approaches). Both cases are subversive because they utilize the tools of the
oppressor (Christian or gnostic) against that oppressor and because the original meaning
of these texts is inverted so the Native population becomes the victor. Thus, Gardens
models itself after the historical Ghost Dance, and the gnostic texts themselves illustrate
this complicated, and subversive, relationship.
Silko uses Hattie's story, in particular, to introduce the gnostic texts and to
critique patriarchal Christianity and its suppression of women's voices since the first
139
several centuries C.E. This, in turn, provides an important foundation for Native
women's stories. At the same time, however, her story also critiques another mode of
oppression----eolonialism-with Hattie this time in the contradictory role of the
oppressor. It is important to remember that the imposition of patriarchy on Native
cultures was part ofthe colonial endeavor. Louise Michele Newman's White Women's
Rights locates the adoption ofpatriarchal practice by Native communities as late as the
beginning of the twentieth century; in the 1880s and 1890s, white "reformers" were still
pushing patriarchy as a way to assimilate Native Americans into the mainstream. White
female reformers, in particular, played a crucial role in this program, and they linked "the
future of white women, the United States, and destitute Indian tribes by suggesting the
need to save, protect, and elevate Indian women" (118). And "civilization," they
believed, would no doubt improve Indian women's lives:
rather than have to do backbreaking labor while their menfolk loafed, they
would experience the joys of domesticity; they would be protected from
sexual exploitation within monogamous, nuclear family structures; and
they would become citizens of a home-loving republic and receive the
blessings of democracy, even without the vote. In short, Indian women
were to be given the gift of patriarchy, with all the protection it afforded.
(119)
Gardens, of course, is set at virtually the same historical moment as these "reforms" were
occurring and, although Hattie is a figure who is herself a victim of patriarchy, she is
nonetheless implicated in the project of colonialism through her paternalistic approach to
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the sisters and her misguided assumption that "she knows best" what they need to
ensure their livelihood and the future survival of their community.
It is thus through the complicated figure of Hattie that the gnostic texts first
appear; they serve throughout the novel as a condemnation of the patriarchal Christianity
that stifles her academic interests and labels them heretical simply because they fail to
comply with the dominant perspective, but they are ultimately subsumed in the larger
interests ofNative cultural survival. The daughter ofLong Island aristocrats, Hattie
becomes interested at a young age in the stories of the heretics. In her catechism class,
"[She] was fascinated by the early years of the church; heresies sprang up almost as soon
as Jesus was crucified. Week after week, the pale Jesuit took them over the great
heresies: Gnostic, Arian, Nestorian, Pelagian, Waldensian, Albigensian, Lutheran,
Calvinist, and Anglican" (97). In this same class, she discovered "the history of church
heresy was far more interesting than the lives of the saints" (97). A gifted student, Hattie
completes her coursework at Vassar College with honors in three years and, with her
father's encouragement, is allowed to attend lectures at Harvard Divinity School "as a
nondegree student until she proved she was capable of [...] graduate work" (98). The
novel suggests she is one of the first women to do so; she is certainly the only woman to
audit classes that semester (100). Hattie thrives when her father's friend, Dr. Rhinehart,
allows her full access to the old Coptic scrolls in his library, which she calls "a lovely
strange garden" of variously colored leather volumes (98).l8 Likewise, she is fascinated
by her seminar on heresy, where she "discovered heresies and heretics never mentioned
in catechism class" (99). Inspired by three Coptic texts in Dr. Rhinehart's library in
particular, Hattie proposes a graduate research project that examines the "female spiritual
141
principle" in the early church and asserts that Jesus had women apostles (l02).
Hattie's thesis proposal causes such a controversy that it is rejected by the committee as
groundless and its primary texts deemed inauthentic "forgeries"; she never fully recovers
from the blow and, in fact, has an emotional breakdown when one ofher male peers
accosts her in her own carriage immediately after the rejection of her proposal (l03). The
doctor diagnoses the breakdown as "female hysteria" and blames the "overstimulation of
the lectures in the presence of young gentlemen for Hattie's illness," a rhetoric that
argues women's inferiority and helps to justify the suppression oftheir rights on medical
and scientific grounds (98).29 Hattie ends up giving up the idea of graduate education and
buries her manuscript in the garden ofher California home in much the same way as the
original gnostic texts Silko relies on were buried at Nag Hammadi.
Though Hattie's world is not yet ready for her revelation about the role of women
in the early church, Silko's use of the gnostic texts does important work in Gardens to
establish the groundwork for a feminine perspective developed in the rest of the novel
through the various gardens Indigo encounters on her journey. The gnostic texts Silko
introduces first resist the Judeo-Christian concept of an omnipotent God who is wholly
other, separated from humanity by a chasm. As Elaine Pagels has indicated in The
Gnostic Gospels, certain gnostics contradicted this orthodox position by asserting "the
self and the divine are identical" (xx). Citing directly Pagels's text, Silko quotes the
gnostic Monoimus as the first ofHattie' s primary sources in Gardens:
Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar
sort. Look for him by taking yourself as a starting point. Learn who it is
within you who makes everything [her] own and says, "My God, my
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mind, my thought, my soul, my body." Learn the sources of sorrow, joy, love,
hate ... If you carefully investigate these matters you will find him in
yourself. (Pagels xix-x, Gardens 101-02)
Rather than a distant God who is separate from humanity, Monoimus claims that God and
the gnostic are two parts of essentially the same being. It is clear why Hattie's professors
(and orthodox Christians) would view his argument as heretical. After all, if self-
knowledge leads to knowledge of the divine, then all forms of authority, and especially
Church authority and its claim as intercessor between God and man, are irrelevant.30 A
second key authority imperiled in this formulation is patriarchy itself. For if women (in
addition to men) can know the divine through self-knowledge, then the entire logic that
justifies the suppression of women' s rights, both inside and outside the church, is at
stake. It's hard to imagine which claim would seem more heretical to Hattie's late-
nineteenth century audience.
Perhaps even more shocking to her audience, however, Hattie's thesis explored
the "female spiritual principle" in gnostic cosmogony.31 Hattie's primary source
concerning this principle is the gnostic text "The Reality of the Rulers," although Silko
takes poetic license with the original and offers a variation of it in Gardens, perhaps to
account for the fact that Hattie's source came from Dr. Rhinehart's late-nineteenth
century Coptic library, which couldn't have contained the text from Nag Hammadi (not
discovered until 1945) (l02). In both the novel and the original gnostic text, however,
Sophia (Wisdom) is directly linked to the supreme Aeon (or Father), and no other Aeons
are mentioned (MacRae 88).32 Although "The Reality ofthe Rulers" doesn't indicate
whether the female spiritual principle actually originates from Sophia, Silko's version
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explicitly claims that this principle is Zoe (Life), Sophia's daughter: "Wisdom,
Sophia, sent Zoe, Life, her daughter [...] as an instructor to raise up Adam" (102).33
Both versions offer essentially the same narrative, although the original is longer: in it,
the female spiritual principle first enters Adam and gives him life, then departs from him
in the form of Eve, then leaves the mortal Eve and enters the body of the snake, and
finally instructs Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit (Layton 70-71). In both texts,
the female spiritual principle speaks through the snake, who is thus linked to the true
Aeon (as opposed to the Judeo-Christian God who is, in gnostic tradition, often an
imposter).
Silko's revision of "The Reality of the Rulers" accomplishes two important tasks
in Gardens: first, it subverts the snake imagery, associated with evil and the fall in
Christian theology, and reinstates it as a form of good (and, perhaps more significantly,
as a form of wisdom through its connection to Sophia).34 Second, it asserts a feminine
presence in the creation story in a way that challenges the authority of patriarchal
Christianity and its traditional use of the same story as ajustification for misogyny. In
other words, Silko rewrites early church history by uncovering buried and excluded
women's histories, and she suggests the suppression of women and their authority by the
church fathers parallels the suppression of women's rights in Hattie's nineteenth-century
world. Silko draws further connections between the colonization of the Americas and the
suppression ofNative histories and the colonization of the East and the suppression of
gnostic thought in the first few centuries C.E. In fact, by revising gnostic scripture in an
American colonial context, Silko responds to Pagels' claim that "the Nag Hammadi
sources, discovered at a time of contemporary social crisis concerning sexual roles,
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challenge us to reinterpret history," and she is intimately involved in the revision of
language and cultural myths that serve "to define who is included-and who excluded-
from participation in the power ofpriests and bishops" (69, 47). The argument can be
extended to the question of exclusion from education and other civic freedoms based on
gender, as seen in Hattie's case. Even more pointedly, however, Silko furthers Pagels's
argument by considering exclusions based on race as well as gender; the complicated,
often paternalistic relationship between Hattie and Indigo is one example. In Gardens,
then, Silko rewrites "The Reality of the Rulers" as a way to examine (and subvert)
hegemonic practice at all levels, not simply as experienced between men and women, but
between colonialist and Native as well.
Gnostic theology is not the only alternative to patriarchal Christianity in Gardens.
Rather, the novel affirms several belief systems, all of which valorize the feminine, and
these are each represented by the various gardens Indigo visits on her journey across the
Atlantic Ocean and back. In fact, while the "gardens" ofthe novel's title first call to
mind the biblical Garden of Eden, Silko's treatment of gardens in the text aims to
destabilize the authority of the biblical origin story by introducing plural "gardens"
throughout the novel that resonate with an alternative, expressly feminine, worldview.
Each garden Indigo encounters introduces another epistemological framework; the first
gardens she experiences after leaving California, for example, are the elaborately
designed and painstakingly constructed gardens on Long Island belonging to Edward's
sister, Susan. Not surprisingly, these gardens serve as the model of colonial gardening
nearly every other garden in the novel is created to resist.35 Tom up and replanted each
season to model current fashions, Susan's monochromatic landscape gardens represent
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what Silko calls "conspicuous consumption to the max" (Arnold 20). The novel
draws parallels between these particular gardens and both capitalism and Christianity
when Susan's bishop gives a mass of thanksgiving in her private chapel, thanking "God
and Susan," in the same breath, for the success of her party, "The Masque of the Blue
Garden," which raised more money for the Church that year than in all previous years
(199). The fact that Susan's gardens are monochromatic is further evidence that they
belong to a dominating perspective: variety and difference are not welcome there.
Not incidentally, Silko counters the bishop's conflation of Christianity,
capitalism, and colonialism through the gnostic texts and themes introduced by Hattie
and through her description of the remaining gardens Indigo encounters as she continues
her journey. Silko argues that there are several possible ways oflooking at gardens in the
novel, and she insists that
one ofthe recurring [themes in the novel is] gardens, innocence, safety.
But also gardens can mean betrayal, plotting. The wicked old Popes used
to go into the garden to plot the deaths ofBishops and Cardinals they
didn't like. Jesus [was] betrayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. That's
intentional, to have that range ofpossible ways of looking at gardens.
(Arnold 20)
The gardens Indigo encounters after her stay on Long Island serve exactly this function:
they illustrate the wide "range of possible ways oflooking at gardens," and they offer
alternatives to Susan's conspicuous consumption and the dominant perspective it
represents. Two of the most notable alternatives in the novel are Aunt Bronwyn's garden
in England and the area surrounding it (steeped in Celtic and Roman mythology) and
146
Laura's terraced gardens in Italy (containing remnants of ancient goddess and fertility
myths). Both of these gardens, and the belief systems they represent, reinforce the
general ideas set forth in the gnostic texts introduced by Hattie-namely, that true belief
is unmediated and that spirituality can (and often did) affirm the feminine.
In the novel, Aunt Bronwyn's gardens represent a pre-Christian England, one that
emphasizes the interrelatedness ofplants and people and believes that plants and trees
have souls. Toads that are "worshiped as incarnations of the primordial Mother," sacred
white cows that belong to the moon, stones that dance after midnight, and oak groves that
house the spirits of the dead are all part of Aunt Bronwyn's worldview, a perspective
informed by Celtic and Roman mythology and used as a guide to care bo* for her own
gardens and the land that surrounds them (243). The toads and their relationship to the
primordial Mother are reminiscent of Silko' s emphasis on the feminine spiritual principle
in the gnostic texts introduced by Hattie. Likewise, Silko makes a comparison between
Aunt Bronwyn's belief system and both the gnostic and Native epistemologies described
in the novel through her inclusion of two artifacts found in the excavations around Bath:
the carnelian depicting the Roman goddess Minerva, seated with a snake; and the figure
ofFortuna, Roman goddess of good luck and blessing, holding "what appeared to be an
ear of com [...J, though it must have been another plant, since com was a New World
plant" (260). In addition to the note about com as a New World plant, the image of the
snake recalls the old Grandfather Snake in the dunes, a symbol of the ancestors (38, 478).
It also alludes to the snake imbued with the feminine spiritual principle in "The Reality of
the Rulers." Snakes in the novel thus function broadly as symbols of suppressed or
buried histories in need of recovery. The emphasis on "artifacts" and "excavations" in
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Bath, and the two female images found there, evokes the discovery ofthe gnostic
texts at Nag Hammadi and the recovery of texts affirming the role ofwomen in the early
church. Finally, the inclusion of the Roman goddesses supports Silko' s concept of a
spirituality that valorizes the feminine.
Not surprisingly, similar imagery is repeated in Laura's Italian gardens. When
Hattie sleepwalks into Aunt Bronwyn's garden, she hears a knocking sound and sees a
"luminous glow" that breathes rhythmically as it approaches (250). Whatever the
apparition is-and Silko doesn't make this clear until the end ofthe novel-it certainly
has some connection to the feminine spiritual principle in gnostic cosmogony; the novel
makes a pointed reference to Hattie's thesis notes as she's trying to make sense of the
encounter (251).36 The language describing Hattie's vision also foreshadows the story
Laura tells of the white princess who disappears into a glowing light in a lake full of
snakes, as well as the image of the Holy Mother appearing on the schoolhouse wall in
Corsica: the words "luminous," "glowing," and "light" are repeated several times in each
section (301-02,321-22). Beyond the description of the snakes that come to greet the
white princess, stone images of Minerva abound in Laura's gardens. There are also
terracotta images of "goddesses that were half snake or half bird" from the fifth
millennium and an egg-shaped sandstone with what looks like a curled snake on it from
the fourth millennium (286-87, 292). Walking through the gardens, Hattie and Edward
stumble across a "snake-headed figure with human arms and breasts that held a baby
snake, but her legs were two snakes" (298). When Hattie walked with Laura, the
proftssora
148
explained the meanings of the symbols found on Old European artifacts: [t]he
wavy lines symbolized rain; Vs and zigzags and chevrons symbolized
river meanders as well as snakes and flocks of waterbirds; goddesses of
the rivers transformed themselves to snakes and then waterbirds. The
concentric circles were the all-seeing eyes of the Great Goddess. (293)37
Rather than the familiar, Judeo-Christian image of the snake as a harbinger of evil, all of
the snake images in Laura's garden are connected with fertility, life, and the feminine
divine. More, Laura's all-black gladiolus garden works to subvert another familiar
Judeo-Christian symbol: black as the sign ofmourning, death, and evil. When Edward
asks about the meaning of the all-black garden, Laura asserts that "to the old Europeans,
black was the color of fertility and birth, the color of the Great Mother" (298). By
challenging orthodox representations of snakes and the color black, and by affirming the
presence of the feminine divine in all the gardens Indigo visits after Long Island, Silko
rewrites patriarchal and racist ideologies prescribed by the orthodoxy.
At the same time as she privileges these various traditions, however, Silko makes
it clear that the feminist perspective they encourage is still sometimes at odds with anti-
colonial practice. This conflict is best illustrated through Hattie, and it recalls the work
of Hazel Carby and Patricia Hill Collins to expose the racist and colonialist elements of
feminist practice after the second wave of the movement. While Hattie is largely a
sympathetic character, she nonetheless maintains characteristics of the oppressor. Thus,
although she does eventually return Indigo to the Gardens in the Dunes, she also plays a
large part in the child's abduction and removal from her home. Again, Hattie's interest in
early church history introduces the gnostic texts in Gardens and supplies a feminine
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perspective that aids the sisters in their survival, but the novel makes it clear that her
presence (as a white woman in need of "protection") at the second Ghost Dance at the
novel's culmination is disruptive and harmful to the outcome of the gathering. After all,
when Hattie's parents come to take her home, they bring with them white soldiers and the
Indian police, who again break up the gathering. This time, however, it's the last day of
the dance and the Messiah is about to appear. Her presence is thus the primary reason
why the Messiah's visit fails and Indigo and Sister Salt are unable to reunite with their
mother, whom they believe will return with him. Hattie's complicity in the colonial
project, no matter how well-intentioned she may be, makes it impossible for her to
remain in Arizona with Indigo, or in the United States for that matter, and she returns to
England to live with Aunt Bronwyn at the novel's end (though not without putting up a
good fight and starting a fire that eventually burns half the colonial town ofNeedles to
the ground). Therefore, even though she is a woman, and even though the novel applauds
her interest in recovering suppressed women's history, Hattie is still responsible for the
role she plays in the colonial project. Ultimately, the novel's main concern is with Native
cultural survival, so when her presence conflicts with the livelihood of Indigo and Sister
Salt, Hattie disappears from the narrative.
The gnostic texts she introduces, however, never entirely vanish. Instead, they are
incorporated into an emerging Native perspective that retains traces of the other sources
and preserves its interest in the feminine by focusing on Native women's stories in
particular.38 Unlike conventional histories that narrate the "disappearance" ofNative
Americans, Gardens emphasizes both the survival ofNative communities and the
disappearance ofEuropeans at the same time as it represents a community that survives
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through its ability to combine and put into practice elements from diverse traditions.
In this way, the sister's garden community maintains strong parallels with the Convent
community in Paradise. The Ghost Dance that returns at the end of Gardens again
emphasizes historical and scriptural revision as a mode of resistance against a
dominating, colonial perspective, and argues for a Native cultural practice that
encourages syncretism as a legitimate form of Native survival. Although there has been
some scholarly disagreement concerning the nature of the historical Ghost Dance,
Gardens treats the movement as a syncretic one, as Shari Huhndorfhas argued in Going
Native:
Historically, the Ghost Dance movement drew upon Christianity (the
figure of the Messiah is one example of Christianity's influence) as well as
upon Native traditions and the visions ofNative prophets. [Gardens] thus
inaugurates the story with the notion that this syncretism is essential to
Native survival.39 (196)
Focusing on the syncretic quality of the historical Ghost Dance illuminates the work
Gardens does to utilize a variety of belief systems in the interest ofNative cultural
survival. Emphasizing moral reformation and the renewal of the world through a return
ofthe Messiah and his family, the dancers in Gardens, as in the historical Ghost Dance
movement, followed the Paiute prophet Wovoka's teachings that they "must dance,
everywhere, and keep on dancing. If they danced the dance, then they would be able to
visit their dear ones and beloved ancestors. [...] They must not quarrel and must treat
one another kindly" (Gardens 25). If they followed all ofWovoka's teachings, the
results would be apocalyptic: "great storms would purify the Earth of her destroyers"; the
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winds would "dry up all the white people and all the Indians who followed the white
man's ways" (25). By using the historical Ghost Dance to frame the narrative, and by
situating the novel after 1890 and the events of Wounded Knee, Gardens prophesies the
ultimate survival ofNative America, the disappearance of all things European, and the
return and renewal of Native lands. For Silko, Native endurance is crucial to the
fulfillment of the prophecy-symbolized by the need to keep on dancing-as is a Native
cultural practice that resists static and essentialist programs for Native survival.
The gnostic and pre-Christian texts that appear in Gardens show how the
revisionist politics of feminism and anti-colonialism can be complementary and yet
sometimes at odds with each other. While doing important work to destabilize the
authority of the master narrative of Christianity and to recover suppressed women's
histories, they are significant only inasmuch as they aid in Native cultural survival; the
same is true for the other systems of belief the novel proposes as an alternative to
orthodox theology. When Indigo returns to the dunes with Sister Salt, she brings along
traces of each of the various systems of belief she has encountered in her travels. The
circle of stones used to build the spirit house of the Lord during the Ghost Dance recalls
the stone circles near Bath, England (456). The gladiolus corms planted in the dunes
come from Laura's Italian gardens, and their black blooms evoke the novel's work to
subvert Judeo-Christian imagery of the color black and the snake through its inclusion of
pre-Christian ancient goddess and fertility myths. On a more practical level, many of the
seeds Indigo gathered during her travels are planted and used as food to sustain the
sisters.
152
Gardens' most striking example of cultural syncretism, however, is the
novel's final image and its relationship to the gnostic doctrine of the female spiritual
principle: when the girls return to the gardens in the dunes, they find the old Grandfather
Snake has been slaughtered by strangers. In the novel, the Snake (and its death)
exemplifies the suppression ofNative cultural practices, but the novel's ending posits
hope for the future: Sister Salt believes that her child, the "little grandfather," is the "old
grandfather's soul returned" (468). Filling the role of old Grandfather Snake, Sister
Salt's racially mixed baby is further evidence of the syncretic nature of Silko's project
and an example of alignment and solidarity with other oppressed groups. When they
discover the old Grandfather's body, the girls carefully gather up his many-hundred rib
bones and "give him a proper burial next to Grandma Fleet" (478). This burial side by
side, like husband and wife, emphasizes the union ofthe two at the same time as it helps
to solve the mystery ofwhat happened to the girls' mother. The novel concludes by
saying that the following spring, "Old Snake's beautiful daughter moved back home"
(479). The return ofthe girl's mother in the form of a snake again supports the recovery
of snake imagery elsewhere in the novel, but more significant is the fact that the snake
itself is both female and living. This final gesture combines elements ofNative tradition
with gnostic (and other) traditions that valorize the feminine at the same time as it
provides a symbol of hope for suppressed histories now recovered and, ultimately, Native
survival. In Gardens, the divine speaker of"Thunder, Perfect Mind" implores her
listeners: "Don't be ignorant ofme!" (231). By rewriting the history ofU.S. colonialism
from a Native perspective, Silko presents a way oflife that is both a radical reassessment
ofD.S. colonial history, a reevaluation of the legitimacy of church authority, and a
viable mode ofNative cultural survival.
153
154
NOTES
1 In an interview with Carolyn Denard while she was writing Paradise, Morrison
claimed that, "in doing novels about African-Americans, I was trying to move away from
the unstated but overwhelming and dominant context that was white history and to move
into another one" (qtd. in Widdowson 316). Karen L. King refers to the master narrative
as the "master story" in The Gospel ofMary ofMagdala (156).
2 Remember that both Morrison and Silko are familiar with Pagels' work.
3 The term is originally Michael M. J. Fisher's. See "Ethnicity and the Post-
Modem Arts of Memory" (1986).
4 In the "Apocryphon of John," for example, there is a "clear rejection of [...]
injustice, sexual exploitation, war, poverty and wealth, and slavery" (King 16).
5 Peter Widdowson's "The American Dream Refashioned: History, Politics and
Gender in Toni Morrison's Paradise" offers the most comprehensive survey of the
novel's fictional and factual "histories." See also Richard L. Schur's "Locating Paradise
in the Post-Civil Rights Era: Toni Morrison and Critical Race Theory."
6 More, to "morganize," according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is "to
assassinate secretly, in order to prevent or punish disclosures, as the Freemasons were
said to have done in the case of William Morgan in 1826." Deacon and Steward
Morgan's last name may allude to the murders of the Convent women, which they help to
instigate. "Morgan" may also be a reference to Way-out Morgan, the black revolutionary
committed to violence (especially against women) in Gwendolyn Brooks' "In the
Mecca."
155
7 Of course, as Widdowson has also pointed out, "that the identity of the white
girl in Paradise remains a mystery merely emphasizes that here it is gender rather than
race which is the key defining characteristic and the crucial potential source of
destabilizing change" (329). As Pat Best reasons in the novel, "everything that worries
[Ruby's purist leaders] must come from women" (217).
8 Karen J. Ford's Gender and the Poetics ofExcess argues that
The aggressively heterosexual masculine [African American]
persona emerged in response to a long history of white racist assaults on
black manhood, evidenced by the physical, economic, and political
castration of African-American men. Understandably, the militarism of
the Black Power movement encouraged a reified view ofmasculinity since
conventional "manhood" was a ready and vital source ofpower to receive.
Wearing uniforms, carrying rifles, and imposing a rigid hierarchy on
supporters were just some of the more visible ways that the Black Panther
party and other militant organizations asserted a notion of masculinity that
was potent and threatening to white people but also exclusive of black
women. (190)
See also Michelle Wallace's Black Macho and the Myth ofthe Superwoman.
9 In a similar vein, Ana Maria Fraile-Marcos argues that "the all-black town of
Ruby constructs an image of itself as an earthly paradise as a consequence of its
engagement with the foundational Puritan myths" and locates the novel within a long-
standing jeremiad tradition used by African Americans "to express poignant social
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criticism [...Jas a chosen people within another chosen nation which, as such, had the
covenantal obligation to be just to them" (3, 8-9). See "Hybridizing the 'City upon a
Hill' in Toni Morrison's Paradise" (2003).
10 "The Disallowing" refers to the rejection of the original families ofRuby by
citizens of the all-black town ofFairly, Oklahoma in 1890. Since these citizens were
"men like them in all ways but one," the travelers knew their exclusion from Fairly was
based solely on the fact that their skin was too dark (189). The name of the town is also a
key indicator that its citizens have internalized racist ideals.
11 Here, Morrison's use of Christian imagery is ironic since the house that
acquires that nickname was a school for Native American girls run by a group of nuns,
and before that, a den of "pagan" revelry. Moreover, the five women who inhabit it have
no affiliation with the Catholic Church and, in fact, are considered heretical by the men
of Ruby. 'The pre-Christian, "pagan" symbols in the Convent destroyed by the Catholic
nuns who later inhabited it can be read as a parallel to the suppression of gnostic belief by
the Church Fathers in the Greco-Roman world.
12 One of the most striking contrasts between Ruby and the Convent is through
the image ofthe Oven, a place for gathering and a symbol in the novel of a well-
functioning community. Largely unused in Ruby, at the Convent the women gather
regularly in the kitchen, where the oven is in full service.
13 Adriane Ivey sees the five Convent women as "harlots in the Promised Land"
in her dissertation chapter by that name, and she claims that Morrison "does not suggest a
rejection of Christian mythology, but instead urges the rewriting and reinterpretation of
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limiting and destructive myths," especially those which reduce women to binaries of
either virgin or whore (152). She reads the women's disappearance in agreement with
Lone's prognosis in Paradise that "God had given Ruby a second chance," but offers no
explanation for their reappearance in the coda (297).
14 Before their salvation, Fraile-Marcos contends, the Convent women live in "a
Purgatory, the space that for Catholics allows a soul tainted by sin to purify itself before
joining God in Heaven" (23).
15 Several critics have emphasized Morrison's rejection of Manichaean binaries
in Paradise and "either/or" formulations that lead to colonization, racism, and the
establishment of communities like Ruby and the Puritan colonies, based primarily on
isolation and exclusion. It is important to note, however, that Mani himself was also a
gnostic, and while Morrison is certainly responding to his more limiting concept of
dualism, she is noting a general difference between the two major branches of gnostic
thought, Iranian and Syrian-Egyptian, rather than condemning the concept of dualism
entirely. Refer to discussion ofdualism in Chapter III.
16 Although it isn't clear whether or not they are twins, Soane and Dovey are the
sisters married to Deacon and Steward, but the first initials of each couple, "s" and "D,"
are the same, creating another ''twin'' of sorts. The names "Merle" and "Pearl" are also
significant, as "Pearl" is an allusion to the gnostic text, "The Hymn of the Pearl."
"Merle" is important for two reasons: 1) it refers to a mottled or speckled color, usually
comprised of black spots on a white background (i.e. a combination of "opposites"), and
2) it's the name ofa common European thrush. Mavis, Merle's mother, is also named
158
after a song thrush, and the combination ofmother/child parallels here may allude to the
divine speaker in "Thunder, Perfect Mind" who proclaims: "I am the mother and the
daughter." (Pallas illustrates another tnother/child conflation in the novel; everyone calls
her "Divine," which is actually her mother's name.)
17 The name of the first community established after "The Disallowing,"
"Haven" is a word synonymous with "Utopia" or "Paradise," but it represents exactly the
kinds of formulations of "paradise" based on exclusion which Morrison resists and which
are also repeated in Ruby (Marcus 1).
18 The text actually says that Consolata emerges "like a Revised Reverend
Mother," suggesting that instead of becoming a revised version of Mary Magna, she
becomes something similar to her in function and purpose, although still only
peripherally (emphasis mine). This distinction indicates once again that the novel is no
longer operating within a normative Christian epistemology.
19 Keep in mind that the novel is still utilizing the Syrian-Egyptian model of
dualism, not the Manichaean, and that the epigraph itself encourages a "unity of
opposites" as the necessary prerequisite for personal salvation.
20 When Consolata asks the stranger ifhe's from town, he answers: "Uh 00. I'm
far country" (252). Like Consolata, whom Mary Magna "rescued" from the streets of
Brazil as a young girl, this man is also an "alien." A primary synibol of gnostic thought,
'''alien'' is a constant attribute ofthe 'Life' that by its nature is alien to this world" (Jonas
49). For the gnostic, the metaphor of an "alien Life" is a constant reminder of
-------------------
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his own alienness, [and] the recognition of his place of exile [...] is the
first step back; the awakened homesickness is the beginning of the return.
All this belongs to the "suffering" side of alienness. Yet with relation to
its origin it is at the same time a mark of excellence, a source of power and
a secret life unknown to the environment and in the last resort impregnable
to it. (Jonas 50)
See also Karen L. King's "Who Are The Gnostics?" (1991).
21 As Consolata prepares the meal, the repetition of images related to the womb
(an "Oven") and childbearing ("eggs," "fluid," "swollen," etc.) indicate that this
transformation is a kind of "rebirth" that will lead to the divinity she now embodies
(260).
22 The novel also revisits the biblical "Last Supper." The fact that the five
women share a meal together, however, is one of the only similarities to the biblical
account of the meal Jesus shared with his disciples before his death and resurrection. In
Paradise, the supper the Convent women share is actually their first meal together as a
group, and the women are anything but Consolata's "disciples." Instead, they think of
her as a "granny goose," a "play mother," and an "ideal landlord," and they initially resist
her transformation into a leader and teacher (262). Most importantly, and quite unlike the
biblical "Last Supper," this meal does not lead to their death first and then, consequently,
to eternal life, but the other way around. In the novel, the women are killed only after
they become "divine."
160
23 Gnostic sources often "acknowledge the need for guidance, but only as a
provisional measure. The purpose of accepting authority is to learn to outgrown it"
(Pagels 131).
24 The "'naked' true self," for example, occurs in gnostic language to describe a
shedding of the "garment" of the world just before the soul's ascension (Jonas 166).
Likewise, a "heavenly garment" also refers to an image of the self that leads to gnosis
when recognized. In the novel, the outlines drawn on the cellar floor serve this function,
and through them the women begin to "know" themselves.
25 The baby Pallas (a.k.a. "Divine") gave birth to sometime between January and
July has also disappeared. According to Soane, Consolata's last words were "something
like 'He's divine he's sleeping divine,'" which allude to the fact that Consolata left the
baby sleeping in the cellar when she came up to investigate the disturbance (291, 289).
Since there is no mention of the men finding or killing him-they find "the devil' s [...]
playpen" but don't mention a child near it-he seems to have disappeared even before the
men come to investigate the cellar (17). In some gnostic texts, and especially in "The
Poimandres of Hermes Trismegistus," the soul actually has the power to become
"impregnable and possibly even invisible" to the cosmic powers that would deter its
ascent (Jonas 167). Something like this may be happening with Pallas' child.
26 Although the Black nationalist movement reified patriarchy, it did help to call
attention to racist inequality in the United States. My aim is not to vilify the movement
but to call attention, as I believe Morrison does, to the different levels of oppression
operating in American history at large.
161
27 In an interview, Silko explained that she intentionally choose these sisters as a
way to rewrite the history of tribes along the Colorado River that were completely
destroyed by ranchers: ''just the good upstanding Arizona territory, the good old boys,
slaughtered all these tribes that are just gone forever. So I decided that my characters
would be from one of these remnant, destroyed, extinct groups. They'd be some of the
last of them" (Arnold 3). Rather than disappearing by the novel's end, however, Gardens
makes it clear that the sisters will survive. See Ellen Arnold's "Listening to the Spirits:
An Interview with Leslie Marmon Silko" (1998).
28 This is the first of the "gardens" visited in the text, and Dr. Rhinehart's name
is itself significant, since a German scholar named Dr. Carl Reinhardt originally
purchased a papyrus book on the antiquities market in Cairo in 1896. Unbeknownst to
him, the codex contained several fifth-century gnostic texts and is now generally referred
to as the Berlin Codex, after the city that houses it. Among other gnostic texts, the Berlin
Codex included The Gospel ofMary, which "presents the most straightforward and
convincing argument in any early Christian writing for the legitimacy of women's
leadership; it offers a sharp critique of illegitimate power and [...] it asks us to rethink
the basis for church authority" (King 3-4). More significantly, it presents Mary of
Magdalene as not only an apostle, but the single most spiritually mature and beloved of
all the apostles. See Karen L. King's The Gospel ofMary ofMagdala: Jesus and the
First Woman Apostle (2003).
29 Hattie's physician would not have been alone in his diagnosis, since "female
hysteria" was still considered a medical condition in the late-nineteenth century and was
162
thought to be especially prevalent among middle-class white women. A popular
diagnosis for a variety of ailments-including weakness, decreased libido, insomnia,
depression, irritability, and nervousness-''treatments were drastic: bleeding, extended
bed rest and [...] surgery to remove the ovaries" (Briggs 247). "Unfeminine behavior"
was often blamed for its onset, as was women's education; "Harvard President Edward
Clark [famously argued] against women's education in 1873 by claiming that the blood
demanded by the brain would prevent the reproductive system from developing properly"
(247-48). (The novel highlights the fact that Hattie's experience occurs while she is
attending Harvard-rather than another university.) Not surprisingly, feminist historical
scholarship of the 1970s has argued that "the hysterical woman [...] is both sign and
symptom of conflict over the cultural meaning of gender" and that hysteria "was also the
way nineteenth-century U.S. and European cultures made sense of women's changing
roles" (246-47).
More recently, Laura Briggs has insisted that issues ofrace must also be
considered in scholarship on hysteria:
The discourse of [female hysteria] was made to make sense in part through
a racial theory of the existence of two kinds of radically discontinuous
bodies and constitutions: one white, nervous, and plagued by weakness;
the other racialized, colonized, and hardy. [...] It also reconceptualized [.
. .] white women's struggle for social and political autonomy from white
men as a racial threat. That is, by insisting that white women were
becoming sterile and weak while non-white women remained fertile and
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strong, it encoded white women's transgressive behavior as a danger to the
future of "the race." (249-50)
See Briggs' "The Race of Hysteria: 'Overcivilization' and the 'Savage' Woman in Late
Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics and Gynecology" (2000).
30 When Silko claims Gardens "is a gnostic novel" in her 1998 interview with
Ellen Arnold, she is referring to this primary gnostic claim: that faith in and knowledge of
God can be unmediated by the orthodoxy. The novel, she argues, thus engages in a "fight
against the corporate church that tries to tell people what is holy" (25). Hattie puts it
another way: "[gnostic] teachings rendered the orthodox church useless; no need for
punishment if there are no laws, only God's love. No need for church hierarchs, or tithes
either" (101).
31 This term is taken from the Bentley Layton translation of the Nag Hammadi
texts, The Gnostic Scriptures. The text Silko quotes from is "The Reality of the Rulers"
(also known as "The Hypostasis of the Archons") (71). In addition to the Layton
translation, Silko also uses the Robinson edition, The Nag Hammadi Library; her version
of "Thunder, Perfect Mind" comes from the latter.
32 Variations on the Sophia myth abound in gnostic scripture. In Valentinian
myth, for example, Sophia is the last (and lowest) of fourteen male-female pairs of
Aeons, and it is through her misguided passion to know the Father that she brings about
"the beginning of all evil" (King, "What is Gnosticism?" 3). For two articles on gnostic
representations of Sophia, see G. C. Stead's "The Valentinian Myth of Sophia" (1969),
and George W. MacRae's "The Jewish Background of the Gnostic Sophia Myth" (1970).
164
33 Silko probably makes this connection between Sophia and the female spiritual
principle because Layton's cast of characters in "The Reality ofthe Rulers" indicates that
the female spiritual principle is "the SPIRIT OF LIFE" (66). In certain gnostic traditions,
Zoe means "Life"; Sophia is her mother.
34 This helps to explain Silko' s use of snake imagery throughout Gardens (and
Almanac ofthe Dead). It also evokes an intersecting between gnostic theology, Native
American epistemologies, and the pagan, goddess mythology of Laura's Italian
gardens-since they are all subverting Christian ideology of the snake as an evil
messenger. Interestingly, Gloria Anzaldua does similar work in her recuperation of
Aztec cosmology.
35 The one exception to this rule is the orange grove and garden in California
where Indigo first meets Edward and Hattie; it serves as a smaller version of Susan's East
Coast garden because it's composed largely of plants obtained during Edward's travels in
South America. The orange groves at their California home also serve as an implicit
connection to colonialism and to Edward's interest in the lemon grafts in Corsica.
36 At the end of the novel, Hattie sees the "luminous glow" again on the second
to last morning of the Ghost Dance, this time outside the sister's lean-to. Sister Salt
explains the light is "the morning star, who came to comfort" Hattie, and she suggests
that both the morning star and the glow Hattie saw in England represent the light of the
Messiah and his family traveling the earth-"they might be anywhere" (471). The
parallel between Jesus and the morning star has biblical origins: most notably, Jesus
refers to himself as the "Morning Star" in Revelation 22: 16. Sister Salt's use of the
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allusion, however, picks up on Native incorporation of Christian symbols as a form of
resistance to U.S. colonialism in the historical Ghost Dance. See Jeffrey Ostler's The
Plains Sioux and u.s. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee for a detailed
account of the Ghost Dance and its culmination in the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890.
37 A version of the Great Goddess' eyes also appears in England when Aunt
Bronwyn and the others visit stone circles near the cloister (probably Stonehenge or the
Avebury stone circles, both relatively close to Bath). Aunt Bronwyn refers to "the circles
and spirals incised in the limestone [as] the eyes of the original Mother, the Mother of
God, the Mother of Jesus" (267).
38 This is a departure from the dominant preoccupation with Indian men in and
an important contribution to Native American literature.
39 In The Plains Sioux and u.s. Colonialism, Jeffrey Ostler argues that the Ghost
Dance wasn't "an instance of syncretism. Talk of a messiah and the renewal of the world
did not so much add something from Christianity to create a new blend as it used
Christianity's central story to reject the entire world of which Christianity was a part"
(255). While it is true that the Ghost Dance incorporated elements of Christian theology
to resist the colonialism such theology justified, Gardens maintains that the Ghost
Dance's syncretic quality-the ability to incorporate elements of Christianity into an
already-existing Native cultural framework, rather than the other way around-made it
more effective (rather than less) as an anti-colonial movement.
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CHAPTER IV
A STAR MORE DISTANT
THAN EDEN: BEYOND LUCILLE AND LUCIFER
The poems of Lucille Clifton are unapologetic in their refusal to ignore the long
history of oppression in the United States. "[I] am accused of tending to the past," the
speaker declares in a poem by the same title, "as if i made it, / as if i sculpted it, / out of
my own hands. i did not" (Quilting 7).1 Instead, she counters, "the past was waiting for
me / when i came / a monstrous unnamed baby, / and i with my mother's itch / took it to
breast / and named it / History" (7). A "monstrous unnamed baby"-akin, perhaps, to
Morrison's "Beloved" who was the focus of the first chapter-the past is a force that
must be reckoned with before a viable future is a possibility. Like Morrison and Silko,
Clifton is acutely aware of the way racist, sexist, and colonialist language and imagery
inherited from sacred texts have been used to justify historical oppression and,
consequently, must be revised to make possible social change. Thus a central focus of
Clifton's revisionary work is the Bible and the narratives it contains; over 150 of her
nearly 500 poems feature biblical characters or incorporate biblical imagery? Clifton's
ten-poem "tree oflife" sequence in Quilting (1991) and the eight-poem "brothers"
sequence in The Book ofLight (1993), in particular, take up the Garden of Eden trope as a
way to reclaim the biblical figure ofLucifer and to challenge the social hierarchies it
condones. Doing so necessitates a radical revision of the divine; grants spiritual authority
to women, especially women of color; calls attention to the silenced histories of the
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United States; and will inform Clifton's visionary and prophetic poems that later
appear in "the message" in Mercy (2004).
Clifton is not, of course, alone in her use of the Eden trope. A long history of its
incorporation in American literature, especially, indicates that her revisions of the Eden
myth are engaging in an ongoing dialogue regarding social relationships in the United
States. As J. Lee Greene sets forth in Blacks in Eden, "the image of America as the new
Eden preceded the discovery, exploration, and settlement of the New World" and was
frequently employed to explain and often justify unequal power structures in the United
States; as such, the Eden trope from the very beginning "occupied [an anchored position]
in America's social, political, historical, and discursive landscapes" (12, 274). American
writers from every cultural background have utilized the trope, though often for different
purposes. The early Anglo-American colonists, for example, finding it difficult to
reconcile the ideal of the New World with the paradox of slavery,
attempted to explain [and justify] this contradiction within the context of
biblical doctrine. To do so, ofcourse, they were required to distort the
Scriptures [...]. The assertion that blacks were not descendants of the
original parents and that their presence in the biblical Garden of Eden
stemmed from the intruding evil (the snake) had popular support during
and well past the colonial period. Southern whites concluded that because
blacks were excluded from the original Eden, they did not merit a place in
the South's Eden that compared to that of whites (supposedly the true
descendants ofAdam and Eve). (14-15)
That African Americans were figured as the snake or "beast" in the Garden of Eden of
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the New World would become a commonplace in much of early Anglo-American
discourse, especially when imagined as a threat to the "purity" of a white Eve, who
represented white America broadly. It is clear from this formulation how Anglo-
America's initial fear of miscegenation was also easily, and conveniently, recast in terms
of the "original sin" and viewed both as an abomination to God and a threat to the nation.
Since the earliest examples of African American literature, the Eden trope has
been incorporated primarily as a way to counter and dispel the myth of the New Eden in
the United States. So central was this project to the concerns of early African American
writers (as well as those who came after) that Greene insists the Eden trope "can be
considered one of [the tradition's] salient characteristics" (6). Although authors have
utilized the trope in a variety of ways, there are nonetheless notable features within the
African American literary tradition and which depart in striking ways from Anglo-
American usage of the same narrative. One central strategy simply inverts the racial
identity of the story's central characters to expose the "true evil" of slavery and US
domestic policy; in these accounts, Lucifer is often the white oppressor. Others recast
Adam as black and "expelled" from (white) American civil society. And, as Greene
relates, "as early as the 1880s African American writers explicitly invoked the
relationship between Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as an analogy for a sexual
union between a black man and a white woman to suggest what such a union symbolized
in the American social structure" (168). In this formulation, "the conflict decidedly is
between two males for power and control. Though Eve is most directly responsible for
violating the taboo restriction that precipitates Adam's Fall, she is a secondary party in
this male competition" (170). Until the mid-twentieth century, and often much later, the
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concerns of the nation were most often cast as issues between different races of men
vying for power. These explicitly patriarchal features, typical of the early African
American revisionist tradition, would come under special scrutiny by later authors,
especially black women writers concerned with revising the sexist as well as racist
dimensions of the tradition.
Congruent with the use of the Eden trope in African American literature, Clifton's
own project is in dialogue with the history of African Americans in the United States, and
biblical revisions and historical critique often go hand in hand for the poet. The Bible
remains a significant text for Clifton precisely because it has been so often distorted to
justify oppression; indeed, no critical study of her poetry can be complete without an
understanding of the work Clifton does to revise and reclaim biblical scripture and to
transpose biblical characters into a contemporary, specifically African American, setting.3
Hilary Holladay has argued that Clifton "repeatedly juxtaposes poems about African
American life with portraits of biblical characters in order to expand our understanding of
both" (128). Several of Clifton's poems expose the atrocities committed in the name of
Christianity through an examination of that tradition's central myths: one poem in
particular points out the irony of slave ships with names like "Angel," "Jesus," and
"Grace of God" (The Terrible Stories 35). Another presents the image of a white woman,
at the lynching of a black man, who is seen "smiling toward the camera, / her fingers
loose around / a christian cross drooping / against her breast" (Blessing the Boats 19).
Yet another rewrites the story of Jonah in the context of slavery and the Middle Passage;
Jonah, the poem's speaker, remembers from the belly of the slave ship "the smell of
mango / and yams" from Africa. "Ifi had a drum," he tells the reader, "i would send [this
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message] to the brothers / -Be care full of the ocean-" (Good Woman 97).4
Biblically derivative and yet also evocative of a history of slavery in the Americas,
''jonah'' is representative of the many poems which incorporate biblical characters and
imagery into a contemporary or historically informed setting.
As critics have pointed out, revising biblical characters serves other purposes as
well; first, and as Akasha (Gloria) Hull has argued, it helps to "transform [...] biblical
figures into plain black folks [in] a move that simultaneously levels and elevates. It
brings the Bible's inhabitants down to earth, while it imparts to black people some of the
status of universal heroes and heroines" (281). Still further, it "(1) Africanizes, (2)
feminizes, (3) sexualizes, and (4) mysticizes the original text. Thus [Clifton] rewrites in
her own image as a black and cosmically spiritual woman" (273). To Holladay, Clifton
has confided:
the Bible people-it's too easy to think of them all as mythological,
saintly folk. It is much more interesting to me that these were humans-
caught up in a divine plan, but human. That seems to me the miracle.
(188)
The "miracle," as Clifton puts it, of human beings engaged in the divinely ordained plan
recorded in the Old and New Testaments, remains the central concern of these poems,
which encompass a wide variety ofbiblical characters-King David, his wife Michal,
Bathsheba, Jonah, Moses, Mary and her mother Anna, among others.
Clifton's most significant revision, however, works to reclaim the character of
Lucifer, the biblical fallen angel and Prince of Darkness. It is especially through the
character of Lucifer that Clifton's revisionary work takes form-from the "tree of life"
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sequence in Quilting to the "brothers" sequence in The Book ofLight. The history of
Lucifer in Christian doctrine is here helpful in understanding the work Clifton engages to
reclaim him. Hull offers an account in "In Her Own Images: Lucille Clifton and the
Bible":
The actual biblical basis for the mass ofmaterial about [Lucifer] is slight.
The most extended reference occurs when the Old Testament prophet
Isaiah decries the ruler of Babylon as "Lucifer": "How are thou fallen
from heaven, a Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut to the
ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou has said in thine heart, I
will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: ...
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the Most High.
Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit" (Isaiah 14:
12-15). In the New Testament book of Luke, Jesus says to his faithful, "I
beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven" (Luke 10: 18). These
references-together with two others in Revelation and Ezekiel-lay the
foundation for the "doctrine that the Devil was a great archangel who
rebelled against God from pride" (Cavendish 1983:1662). (289)
So little actual biblical scripture regarding Lucifer, and yet so much use ofhis figure in
the history of Christianity in general and in the historical use of the Garden of Eden trope
especially, makes him a character worthy of Clifton's attention. More, the etymological
root of Lucifer is "light," yet Lucifer has been figured historically as a "dark" or evil
character: this point in particular would be of interest to a poet concerned with exposing
and undermining historical (and biblical) sources ofracism.
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In Wild Blessings, Holladay has acknowledged that Clifton's revisions of
Lucifer differ from her earlier biblical revisions, especially in the "brothers" sequence:
"the sequence has elements in common with her other biblical poems, but it is more
detailed in its theological intent and more probing in its questionings. Though it is not
her last poem making use of the Eden myth, 'brothers' feels like a culmination, a
summing up of many years of spiritual searching" (131). Clifton's treatment of Lucifer,
in particular, helps to clarify her own position as a poet engaged in communication with a
divine, or spiritual, source. After all, "Lucille," like "Lucifer," has at its etymological
root the word "light"; here, as in numerous poems throughout Clifton's oeuvre, Clifton
likens herself to Lucifer (and him to herself). By repeatedly comparing herself of the
figure of Lucifer, Clifton aligns herself with God's primary critic, the Devil, and
interrogates God to expose His culpability in the events of history. The first in a series of
revisions to reclaim the Lucifer figure, the idea of the devil as God's "critic," rather than
His ultimate archenemy, is itself an unconventional role for Lucifer and one Clifton will
develop throughout the two sequences. While Holladay notes Clifton's work in
"brothers" to draw parallels between the human and the divine and to revise the figure of
Lucifer to "[speak] for human suffering rather than evil," this chapter takes up the
ramifications of this revision, especially for the character of God and the proliferation of
the Word in the Lucifer poems and throughout Clifton's work (138). After all, to revise
the figure ofLucifer as akin to the divine is to revise the divine to contain elements of
Lucifer, which shatters the concept of God as flawless. To do so not only breaks down
inherited binaries of God as all "good" and Lucifer as unquestionably "evil," but it also
means that the divine can no longer be counted on for salvation from oppressive
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historical circumstances. This has important implications for the poet who, lacking a
saving Word from the divine, must create her own words; this new sacred text proposes a
new moral code and will be the subject of Clifton's "the message" in Mercy.
Although her project is mainly concerned with the history of African Americans
in the United States, Clifton nonetheless departs in striking ways from the characteristic
use of the Eden trope as documented in Greene's Blacks in Eden.5 Whatever the specific
shape the trope took, in Greene's account, female sexuality was still seen as the primary
cause of the conflict in the Garden of Eden and the root of the original sin. Clifton's
refusal to denigrate Eve makes her revision of the Eden myth an anomaly within the
tradition, and her work reflects new currents in African American literature since the
mid-twentieth century, specifically literature written by black women authors. In
Clifton's revisions, for example, Adam is decentered to the position of a minor character,
a move that shifts from the traditionally masculinist narrative that figured the conflict as
one between two males (one human, one omnipotent) warring for power. Rather than
simply inverting the power structure, however, Clifton also positions Eve as a minor
character, though she is cast as quicker and more intelligent than the slow-moving Adam.
She is no longer responsible for the fall of mankind or, therefore, is no longer the source
of evil. Significantly, she is still sexualized, but not as a taboo; nowhere in Clifton's
revisions is Eve's sexuality cast in a negative light. Clifton thus erases the Puritanical
fear and loathing of sexuality ingrained in traditional interpretations of the Eden myth.6
Finally, the characters aren't racialized in specific ways; unlike many of Clifton's other
biblical poems, the characters don't speak in dialect. This is significant because it
implicates all people in the project of the American civil utopia (or New Eden) and, as
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becomes evident in the poems, in the (transnational) problem of oppression in
general. The conflict, and most of the communication, is largely between Lucifer and
God, or observed by the other angels in Heaven. A snake in form, but not a beast in the
traditional sense, Lucifer is cast in the text as neither white nor black, as he is also neither
explicitly male nor female. In Clifton's version, it is Lucifer, rather than Adam or Eve,
who is centered and reclaimed from the tradition that figured him as a (black) beast and a
threat to the purity ofwhite America.7 In a surprising move, Clifton casts Lucifer in a
humanizing light as an "illuminator" of "what has not been clear."s Even more
surprising, she uses Lucifer as a means of redefining the nature of the divine itself; after
all, Clifton's decision to recoup the Lucifer figure in "tree oflife" and "brothers" is a
significant departure from the traditional use of the Eden trope in the African American
tradition, as documented by Greene, since rather than merely inverting the characters in
the mythical battle between "good" and "evil," she redefines the nature of those terms
entirely.
At the beginning of the "tree of life" sequence, which illuminates Lucifer's own
perspective on the Garden of Eden narrative, Clifton makes one minor adjustment to the
biblical epigraph which begins the piece: instead of an exclamation point, Clifton
replaces the punctuation instead with a question mark. The change is major. The
scripture-and by extension the entire poem-becomes a text that questions, rather than
affirms, Lucifer's fallen state: "How art thou fallen from Heaven, /0 Lucifer, son ofthe
morning? .. / -Isaiah 14:12" (Q 71). Presumably asked of Lucifer by the other angels in
heaven, who narrate offand on throughout the sequence, the epigraph presents a
confused host of angels mystified by the excommunication of Satan from heaven.
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Clifton's choice of biblical scripture here is significant as well since in this passage,
and in the first poem of the sequence, Lucifer, as in the King James Version of the Bible,
is referred to as the "son of the morning"-in other translations as the "morning star"
(NIV, NASB, NIRV)-a term used in the New Testament to describe Christ-the
beloved son of God (2 Peter 1: 19, Revelation 22: 16). Although the comparison of
Lucifer to the "morning star" is sometimes referred to as a translator's error, Clifton
capitalizes on the ambiguity of the passage to question conventional biblical
hermeneutics regarding Lucifer's involvement in the fall ofmankind and his position in
the line-up of God's affections. By questioning Lucifer's fallen state, and by presenting
him as beloved of the other angels and of God, the poem opens up the possibility that his
excommunication from heaven was one big mistake. If Lucifer was not entirely evil-if
in fact he was "the son of the morning"-then surely his fall from grace was an instance
of divine injustice. Throughout the sequence, Lucifer also appears confused about his
rejection from heaven-at the same time as he offers insights about both its state and the
state of earth and is presented as a sympathetic character altogether.
Considered together, these features function to center Lucifer in the Garden of
Eden narrative and to claim him in the tradition ofAfrican American mythmaking.
Holladay has pointed out that
[Clifton's] portrayal of Lucifer has important antecedents in African and
African American religion and folklore. During the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, African Americans' concept of the devil was not
strictly grounded in Christian notions of sin and evil, perhaps because the
idea of original sin was unknown to their African ancestors. [...]
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According to Melville Herskovits's account in The Myth a/the Negro Past,
the devil's good qualities can be traced to 'that character in Dahomean-
Yoruba mythology, the divine trickster and the god of accident known as
"Legba'" [...]. Since they had a vested interest in the abolition of slavery,
it follows that the slaves would project their fondest desires on a trickster
god capable of outsmarting his adversaries. [...] The widespread belief
that the devil was black no doubt heightened African American interest in
this compelling figure. (129)
The poet's own family traces its lineage to Dahomey women, which would, perhaps,
make Legba an even more appealing character for Clifton's revisionary project. Either
way, though, the Legba figure reveals Clifton's work to incorporate a variety of other
spiritual traditions into her poetry. Although her primary text in "tree oflife" and
"brothers" is the Bible, throughout her poetry Clifton is interested in drawing parallels
between seemingly disparate ideas and traditions, and her poems in general explore
diverse mystical traditions. In addition to her emphasis on the Bible, there are poems
treating the Hindu goddess Kali and ones with links to gnostic theology. Likewise, there
are poems featuring the "tree of life" of esoteric Kabbalah and ones composed to
represent Clifton's own experience with channeling. In fact, she is careful not to
privilege anyone spiritual tradition over another. The resulting polytheism destabilizes
the authority of the master scripture, the biblical narrative, and to posit alternative ways
of understanding the relationship between good and evil. Rather than merely inverting
the narrative of the Eden myth to claim authority for African Americans, and for women
of color in particular, Clifton refuses to engage the damaging logic imbedded in it; she
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insists that "good" and "evil" are not mutually exclusive and are, instead, two parts of
the whole.
As the character closest to God in Clifton's prelapsarian Eden, Lucifer serves as
God's primary companion, confidante, and critic. This is, in itself, a major revision of
the Lucifer figure. As the "brothers" sequence will do in The Book ofLight, "tree of life"
questions the presence of evil (often formulated as "darkness" in the Judeo-Christian
tradition) in a world created by a benevolent God (representative of "light"). After all, 1
John 1:5 decrees that "God is light; in him there is no darkness at all." The sequence thus
begs the timeworn question: why, if God is "good" and loves His creation, did He allow
the "fall" that led to human suffering? More, why does He continue to allow suffering
and the violence of history? As the "Prince ofDarkness," Lucifer is the poem's main
subject-although Adam and Eve appear in minor parts throughout. In the last poem of
the sequence, Lucifer is again referred to as the "son / [...] of the morning"; at the same
time, he is also called the "light-bringer" (Q 80). In other poems in the sequence, he is
described as a "bringer oflight" and, similarly, as a "bearer oflightning" (71, 75). These
references to light and lightning, and the last one in particular, are presumably based on
Jesus' words to his followers-"I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven" (Luke 10:
l8)-yet contrast with conventional biblical understanding that "God [alone] is light" (l
John 1: 5). Because "God is light" and because the world (including, presumably, the
angels) is created in His image, then all created things, including Lucifer, are derived
from the "light." In addition, Clifton likens "light-bearing" to artistic creation; all
creation, in the image of God, has the potential to create and thereby imitate God. By
calling Lucifer the "light-bringer," Clifton reminds us ofhis source at the same time as
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she equates him with Christ through her description of him as the "son of the
morning." Doing so recasts Lucifer in the role of a savior and affirms in him the divine.
In other words, since Lucifer is equated with Christ, "the morning star," and since Christ
is one-third of the Godhead, then Lucifer is also a part of God. According to the poem,
this is what it means to have "knowledge of good and evil" (that is, knowledge of God's
character), and this is the understanding Lucifer encouraged in Adam and Eve. Here,
Clifton offers another version of the story of Creation and the Fall, one that recasts
Lucifer in a creative, rather than destructive, role.
In this first poem of the sequence, in fact, Clifton asserts that Lucifer's fall from
heaven and the creation of the world actually went hand in hand. Clifton rewrites Lucifer
as co-creator of the world: "light breaks / where no light was before / where no eye is
prepared / to see / and animals rise up to walk / oh lucifer / what have you done" (Q 71).9
Lucifer's excommunication from heaven is described in terms of a creation since it
causes "light [to] break" and "animals [to] rise up to walk." Linking Lucifer's fall from
heaven to God's famous command-"Let there be light" (Genesis 1: 3)-the poem
implies that Lucifer's fall from grace was both divine will and prerequisite to creation. It
links the two "falls"-the first of Lucifer and the second ofAdam and Eve-and suggests
their similarities; in doing so, it affirms Lucifer's basic humanity rather than upholds his
unquestioned devilry. Time and again, Clifton asserts that Lucifer's actions were a
creative act, and she capitalizes on the ambiguity first created by reference to Lucifer as
the "son ofthe morning" in the poem's epigraph, and then by his additional role as a
"light-bringer" throughout, to complicate notions of God as essentially and
unquestionably "good" and the devil as all "bad." Instead, she argues, they all hail from
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the same source, or light, whose primary goal is to illuminate what has not been
seen.
10 The significance of this revision of God's character in particular will be taken up
more fully in the "brothers" sequence.
In fact, in a surprising move, Lucifer is actually rewritten as a savior of
humanity-instead of its destroyer-in the final poem of the ''tree of life" sequence; in "i
who was called son," the Prince ofDarkness justifies his infamous actions in the Garden
of Eden by describing them as humanitarian:
i who was called son
if only of the morning
saw that some must
walk or all will crawl
so slithered into earth
and seized the serpent in
the animals i became
the lord of snake for
adam and for eve (Q 80)
Lucifer's actions are here motivated by what appears to be a genuine concern for God's
creation-he does what he does ''for Adam and for Eve"-and are the direct result of his
particular insight. The word "saw" in the poem is synonymous with understanding, and
Lucifer acts immediately after he "sees." It is thus his understanding that serves as the
catalyst for Lucifer's response, and his actions are remarkably similar to God's; Lucifer
gave Adam and Eve the understanding he himself had-like God, he created them in his
own image. To do so, Lucifer "became" the lord of snake. Clifton's use of the be verb
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here echoes God's response to Moses when asked His name: "I am that I am"
(Exodus 3: 14). Like God, then, Lucifer creates himself and is "lord"-albeit only "of
snake." The ambiguity created by the enjambed line, however, is anticipated by the
medial caesura between "the animals" and "i became" of line sixteen: "i became / the
lord of snake." It emphasizes Lucifer's self-creation at the same time that it calls
attention to his status as "lord"-two attributes conventionally attributed only to God. By
likening the two characters to each other, Clifton positions Lucifer as God's equal in both
creative force and divine insight.
Lucifer's divine insight is further explored through his role as "illuminator" in the
final poem in the sequence. Rather than relegate all creation to "crawl[ing]"-symbolic
of a state devoid of understanding or insight-Lucifer enables Adam and Eve to "walk."
Their understanding, the "knowledge of good and evil" they gain from eating the
forbidden fruit, that is, is thus recast in positive terms. More, the "knowledge of good
and evil" is actually the knowledge of the character of God Himself: containing elements
of both good and evil. In this same poem-"lucifer speaks in his own voice"-Lucifer
further explains his actions by claiming, simply, that "illuminate i could," so "illuminate i
did" (80). In other words, the capacity for illumination, or creation, compelled the action
and thus justifies the deed. The word "illuminate" is linked to the understanding Lucifer
granted Adam and Eve, and the ability to cast light-to illuminate matter and bring
knowledge to others-appears to be ample explanation, at least in Lucifer's mind, for the
events that ensued. Likewise, in her use of the word "illuminate," Clifton links Lucifer's
creative action to poetry; here she calls attention to the relationship between herself and
the Prince of Darkness, and in particular to their mutual role of poetic "illumination," a
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point which Alicia Ostriker has taken note of in "Kin and Kin" (320).11 In doing so,
she rewrites his actions in the Garden of Eden as a creative and redemptive act at the
same time that she puts herself in the position to critique God's action (and inaction)
through her own creation: poems revising biblical myths.
To assert that Lucifer is part of the divine, and to propose that Lucille is part of
Lucifer, is to maintain that women ofcolor are also part of the divine. In doing so,
Clifton claims an element of the divine for those, who, like Lucifer, have historically
been silenced. To reclaim him is therefore to reclaim women of color from being
demonized because of difference. This is Clifton's contribution to the African American
tradition's long fascination with the Eden trope: she illuminates the problem of difference
inherent in it-that mythic battle between good and evil that has fueled the violence and
oppression of history-by undermining its divisive logic. Instead of upholding the idea
that "good" and "evil" are opposing, and therefore mutually exclusive, forces, Clifton
calls attention to their interrelated nature and in doing so redefines the terms themselves.
One way she does so is through the image of the six-fingered hand, an image she has
used throughout her poetry but in "tree of life" in particular to draw further parallels
between herself and Lucifer and as an image of creative and spiritual potential. In
"whispered to lucifer," Lucifer is referred to as "six-finger[ed]" by the other angels in
heaven; Clifton was likewise born with six fingers on each hand, two of which were
removed when she was an infant (Q 73, Holladay 199-200).12 More surprising still, even
God may have had a sixth finger, since "remembering the birth of lucifer" claims the
Prince ofDarkness "broke / from the littlest finger / of God" (72). Clifton uses this
unusual image of six fingers to claim creative and poetic authority, both for herself and
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for Lucifer. In an interview with Holladay in 1998, Clifton claimed: "I've said that I
know there's Lucifer in Lucille, because I know me [...]. And there is the possibility of
Lucille in Lucifer. It's too easy to see Lucifer as all bad. Suppose he were merely being
human" (188). Despite the fact that Lucifer is traditionally understood as a fallen angel,
Clifton takes poetic license throughout her poetry and rewrites him with both human and
divine attributes. In Wild Blessings, Holladay has argued that "Lucifer's role in the grand
upheaval explains his appeal to Clifton, long fascinated by biblical characters' flaws and
foibles. Her humanizing of Lucifer is in keeping with her belief that the human and the
divine are intertwined, our understanding of one contingent upon an awareness of the
other" (127). Throughout the "tree oflife" sequence, and elsewhere in her poetry, Clifton
emphasizes this interrelated nature of the human and the divine; she blurs the historical
divide between good and evil; and she sets herself up as a Lucifer figure herselfthrough
her emphasis on six fingers and through a connection to "light," "illumination," and the
creative act embodied in their names. She does by first revising conventional scripture
that envisions Lucifer as unquestionably and entirely evil; in accomplishing this
significant feat, Clifton is then able to write herself into a conversation with the divine
through the Lucifer persona.
Clifton's work to revise and reclaim the Lucifer figure continues in The Book of
Light-in addition to the title's reference to "light," one of the sections of the book is
called "lightning bolt." Lucifer is especially at the fore in "brothers," located at the end
of the collection, but it is here more than anywhere that Clifton's revisionary impulse
turns to the figure of God Himself. "Brothers" begins by briefly explaining the sequence
of poems to come as "a conversation in eightpoems between an aged Lucifer and God,
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though only Lucifer is heard The time is long after" (The Book ofLight 69).13 The
silence of God in these poems again casts Lucifer in a humanizing light, since, like many
people, including Lucille Clifton, we presume, he strains to hear the voice of God, which
never comes to him. In the first poem of the sequence, Lucifer affectionately invites God
to "come coil with [him]," a move which casts God, at least visually, as a second snake
(69).14 The fact that the poem is called "brothers" and the ease with which Lucifer
addresses God indicate a high level of familiarity; Lucifer and God are family. As in the
"tree oflife" sequence, Lucifer again offers his own explanation of the Garden of Eden
narrative. In the third poem, entitled "as for myself," Lucifer wonders about the
significance of his own role in the events in the Garden: "Less snake than angel/less
angel than man / how come i to this / serpent's understanding?" (71). More "man" than
either angel or snake, Lucifer's "serpent's understanding" is merely the ability to see that
God is both more and less than what He has been imagined, by His followers and even by
Himself. He is both good and evil, as Clifton's treatment of the tree ofknowledge of
good and evil in "tree of life" suggests. In the second poem ofthe sequence, Lucifer tells
God that He is "beyond / even [His] own understanding" (70). According to Lucifer in
this sequence, God is therefore a bit of a paradox: both knowing and unknowing-a
"perfect / imperfection" (70). Having already revised the character of Lucifer in the "tree
of life" sequence to draw parallels between herself and Lucifer, Clifton now uses this
"conversation" to challenge and revise the myth of the omniscient Patriarch of the Judeo-
Christian tradition.
Although Greene's Blacks in Eden provides a helpful vantage from which to view
the historical trajectory of the Eden trope in African American literature, his study only
.....------_~-------- -- _.._---
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considers literature written before the 1960s. Major historical changes, coupled with
hermeneutical shifts in African American religious thought by the 1970s, meant that
authors incorporating the Eden trope after these years were engaging new concerns and
ones specific to their cultural moment. One seminal event during the latter years of the
twentieth century was the inception of black liberation theology, which, as Jacquelyn
Grant explains, "represent[s] a departure from traditional Christian theology. As a
collective critique, liberation theologies raise serious questions about the normative use
of Scripture, tradition and experience in Christian theology" (831). A theology for the
oppressed, black liberation theology was introduced in 1966 by a group of African
American ministers who used the Bible as the basis of their call for a more aggressive
fight against racism in the United States and who drew upon earlier liberation theologies,
particularly those of the Jesuits, who in the 1960s engaged in political activism as a
means to fight global poverty. At the heart of black liberation theology are certain
assumptions about the nature of God. One of the leading intellectuals and founders ofthe
movement, James Cone, was adamant in his insistence that the Judeo-Christian God is
the God of the oppressed and that He is actively working toward their liberation. He
argued "either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience
becomes his, or he is a god of racism. Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not
identified totally with the goals of the black community" (African American Religious
Thought 850). Later criticism of the theology, however, and especially William R. Jones'
"Divine Racism: The Unacknowledged Threshold Issue for Black Theology," contends
that God can only be proven a liberator of the oppressed if, in fact, there is actually
evidence that He has worked toward their liberation in the past: "in the absence of this
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demonstration, the remainder of the system totters for want of a convincing structural
validity" (871). Jones concludes: "that the situation of blacks still requires radical
correction indicates [Cone's] classification [of God] is premature if not gratuitous" (869).
Major criticisms ofthe theology, including womanist theologies developed by Grant and
others, similarly fault the movement for its limited notion of the divine, claiming that it is
untenable to envision a God who is against some forms of oppression (racism, for
example) but not others (like sexism). Like Jones, Grant has also criticized certain tenets
of the movement, especially its adherence to patriarchal structures of oppression:
[Ironically], some liberation theologians have acquiesced in one or more
oppressive aspects of the liberation struggle itself. Where racism is
rejected, sexism is embraced. [...] In order for liberation theology to be
faithful to itself it must hear the critique coming to it from the perspective
of the Black woman-perhaps the most oppressed ofall the oppressed
(831-32).
Clifton's Lucifer is a fitting contribution to this historical debate since through him she
reclaims for Grant those voices missing from the theological dialogue. What happens
when Lucifer is centered, however, and as Clifton makes apparent in her "brothers"
sequence, is a major departure from the tenets of black liberation theology, an awareness
of the concerns voiced in womanist theology, and, ultimately, a revision of the nature of
the divine Himself.
"Brothers" begins as a poetic theodicy but succeeds, finally, in debunking the
myth of the benevolent patriarch altogether. In the sixth poem ofthe sequence, Clifton
quotes Carolyn Forche-"The silence of God is God" (BOL 74).15 In the eighth, the
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same line is repeated, omitting the first four words: " is God" (76).
The significance of this omission bears on the meaning of the poem as a whole, and the
poem itself enacts the quotation since only Lucifer is heard speaking in a conversation
between the two characters. Indeed, the extended ellipsis suggests that this "visual
silence" best defines God. More, the fact of God's silence and indefinable nature allows
the divine to be anything we make of Him, as is obvious by the historical manipulation of
the Bible to condone slavery and colonialism. That the space is left blank also opens up
the possibility for a redefinition of who or what, exactly, "God" is. The conversation
Lucifer attempts with God in the sequence aims to understand His role in creation, the
fall, and the violent and flawed physical world that followed, and it echoes themes
introduced in the "tree of life" sequence regarding "knowledge of good and evil" as
knowledge of the character of God. To drive this point home, God is presented in this
sequence as aged, unsure, and imperfect. As in "tree of life," Lucifer and God are cast as
two parts of one divine force since they did what they did together: they were "like two
old brothers / who watched it happen and wondered / what it meant" (69).16 The outcome
of creation does not appear to be what God expected, however. In the second poem, for
example, Lucifer tells God that creation "in all its pride, / its unsteady dominion, / is not
what You believed / You were, / but it is what You are; / in Your own image as some /
lexicographer supposed" (70). Here, rather than uphold the conventional story regarding
his involvement and culpability in the fall, Lucifer refers to Adam and Eve's "odd
ambition, the desire / to reach beyond the stars" instead as a by-product of God's own
character; it was "You, all You / [...] the perfect / imperfection" (70). What happened
afterwards can only be God's fault: "only You could have called / their ineffable names, /
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only in their fever / could they have failed to hear" (72). As they desert the Garden
forever, Adam and Eve are "fever[ish]" with shock, and their "fail[ure] to hear" is the
result of hearing the divine verdict. As for the two of them, Lucifer claims, their "only
sin / was being their father's children" (72). Once again, Lucifer reminds God that the
world he created was made in His image, so its defects are also His.
If creation is imperfect, so is God; and if mankind awaits the answers of Judgment
Day, so does God, who in this poem doesn't seem to comprehend what's happening any
more than Lucifer does. This doesn't make Him blameless, though; after all, many
historical atrocities have been committed in His name. In the sixth poem ofthe sequence,
Lucifer interrogates God: "tell me, tell us why / You neither raised Your hand / nor
turned away, tell us why / You watched the excommunication of / that world and You
said nothing" (74). God may not have been responsible for the crimes of history, but
neither did He stop them. Clifton's incorporation of images of assault in this sequence-
"babies stacked like cordwood," "limbs walking away from each other," and "tongues
bitten through"-are a pointed reminder that she is referring to nonbiblical history (74).17
By asking God to "tell us why," Lucifer indicates that his audience includes many others
besides himself who are curious to hear a justification of God's inaction. "That world"
that Lucifer refers to is, most literally, the world ofprelapsarian Eden, but it also alludes
to the project of a New Eden, begun by the European colonists and justified despite the
damning presence of slavery and the genocide ofNative Americans. What's striking
about Clifton's version is that, unlike the absolute patriarch of orthodox theology-and
atypical of historical usages of the Eden trope in African American literature--God
appears in these poems as a pitiful character, neither omnipotent nor all-knowing, and
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certainly not to be counted on in a crisis. Although her revision of the Eden trope has
a specific place in African American literature and references its particular history, the
terms are general enough to refer to the crimes of history on a global scale. The problem
of God (and the narratives He inspires) is a universal one, and His silence on the issue
makes it impossible, finally, to support the theodicy of His divine benevolence.
The final poems in the sequence, though they acquiesce to God's mysterious
nature-"to ask You to explain / is to deny You"-nonetheless do so with a knowledge
of His essential unreliability (76). God has not historically shown Himself to be the God
of the oppressed. Clifton's response to the issue of divine benevolence in black liberation
theology thus offers a radical departure from the hermeneutics embraced by leading
intellectuals of the movement: human beings, engaging in struggles for liberation against
oppression, can no longer rely on God to save them (if they ever could). The penultimate
lines of the poem, in fact, serve as both a blessing and a warning: "You kiss my brother
mouth. / The rest is silence" (76). The kiss, though it can convey affection and
acceptance, can also signal betrayal. After all, Judas betrayed Christ with a kiss in
another biblical garden, Gethsemane. The poem suggests that God similarly betrayed
Lucifer by inculpating him in the narrative of Eden and insuring for Himself a scapegoat
for His own crimes; in the end, it is the patriarch of Judeo-Christianity, not Lucifer, who
is revealed as untrustworthy, prideful, and fickle. In later poems, Clifton will disregard
the traditional God of patriarchal Christianity altogether, referring to Him as "antic"-in
other words, as an utter joke (Mercy 15).18 Instead of relying on God for salvation from
oppression, Clifton instead posits self-salvation. In "the meeting after the savior gone,"
which is dated "4/4/68" and commemorates the death ofMartin Luther King, Jr., the
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speaker tells the crowd hungry for salvation from racial and other forms of
oppression: "what we decided is I you save your own self. I everybody so quiet. I not so
much sorry as I resigned" (GW31). The odd locution of the poem's title and the date that
accompanies it indicates that the "savior" refers both to King and to Jesus Christ. At the
same time as it announces the death of King, the race leader and "savior" ofAfrican
America, it also asserts that Jesus Christ, the "savior" of the oppressed, is also "gone"
(and with Him faith in a benevolent God). The advice the poem offers to "save your own
self," is particularly devastating, therefore, because it gives up not only on race leaders
but also on God since He allows them to be murdered. In the absence of a saving
power--or a government working in their interest, for example-Clifton understands that
the responsibility for revolution rests on the oppressed since those in power are only
interested in securing it for themselves. With the Judeo-Christian God redefined as a
loose cannon who betrays in the same instant He blesses, then, and with a reminder of
God's historical silence, who will become the bearer ofthe Word? What moral code will
guide the oppressed when the old codes have been abused or are found inadequate?
* * *
In 1974, while playing on the family Ouija board with her two oldest daughters,
Clifton received a brief message from someone who identified herself as "THELMA."
Immediately recognizing the name ofher deceased mother, Clifton skeptically put the
board away. A few days later, she took it down again to ask what was happening. It
answered: "It's me, baby. Don't worry about it. Get some sleep" (Hull 330). So began a
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series of encounters in the 1970s and the beginning of Clifton's work with automatic
writing, a process she refers to as "listening-hearing" (340). In "Channeling the
Ancestral Muse," Hull recounts Clifton's gradual acceptance of this unusual practice:
Clifton came to believe that this was, in fact, her mother, whose presence
was also being felt by the rest of the family. All six of her children saw
and had experiences of some sort with her. [...] Over a period ofyears,
the family, in Clifton's words, "incorporated the nonvisible into our
scheme for what is real. It worked for us." (340)
After several years, and through the medium of automatic writing, Clifton began to
receive messages from beings other than her mother (340). In a series of poems not
published until 2004, Clifton documented an exchange between herself and a group of
beings referred to as "The Ones." Unlike Clifton's earlier communication with her
mother, these twenty-three poems were received by Clifton from a source that insisted
they were not ancestors, had never been alive, and were not now dead. Published in
Mercy and entitled "the message," the missive they relayed to Clifton contained, in part, a
new moral code to replace the old code of Christianity. Published thirty years after their
transmission, the poems in "the message" depart from the Lucifer poems to document a
radically different world. Instead of a Garden of Delight, or even a space where Lucifer
and God can come together as "brothers," The Ones describe a world of unprecedented
evil in dire need of a new spiritual guidance.
With ''the message" in Mercy, Clifton shifts from being a poet who poeticizes
sacred texts to one who transcribes the voices of The Ones. In receiving these messages
from a spiritual source, Clifton follows a long line of poets, perhaps most notably
-------------------------
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William Blake and W. B. Yeats. Blake, especially, referring to his own
compositional practice, insisted on one version of the automatic writing process: "I have
written the Poem from immediate Dictation ... without Premeditation & even against my
Will" (qtd. in Johnston 15). Yeats, while composing A Vision worked "from the
automatic script of his wife, Georgie, who had begun receiving messages from the spirit
world shortly after their marriage" (11). In Precipitations: Contemporary American
Poetry as Occult Practice, Devin Johnston suggests that one of the appeals of the occult
for poets is "the ways in which it constitutes a direct response to contemporary culture.
In several cases [...Jpoets invoke it as an analog to contemporary strains of thought in
science and philosophy" (2). He further argues that "occultism has offered a pragmatic
or situational model for consciousness" (16). This is especially the case in the American
tradition, where H. D., Robert Duncan, James Merrill, Nathaniel Mackey, Susan Howe,
and Dolores Kendrick have all practiced forms of automatic writing; Merrill, like Clifton,
used a Ouija board. Clifton's own transmissions in "the message," while certainly
offering a model for consciousness, extends Johnston's model and employs automatic
writing to produce a new sacred text to replace the old code discarded in her revisions of
the Lucifer figure.
Immediately following Clifton's seven-poem sequence "september song," which
documents the events of September 11, 2001, the poems of "the message" describe a
world infiltrated with destructive social hierarchies and religious ideologies and on the
brink of environmental devastation. Transmitted to Clifton in the 1970s, right at the
moment of Civil Rights and the start of ecological disaster, it is significant that Clifton
withheld these poems from publication for over three decades. In the meantime, she
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published both "tree of life" and "brothers," both of which remained hopeful that the
human would triumph over its own worst tendencies toward violence and ruin. After
9/11, however, that hope seems to disappear. In fact, the contrast between the three
sequences of poems on this account is striking. "Tree oflife" relates a world outside of
the Garden that nonetheless "seemed very eden," and, in "brothers," Lucifer recounts a
world that led from the Garden "into delight. into the sharp / edge of seasons, into the
sweet / puff of bread baking, the warm / vale of sheet and sweat after love, the tinny
newborn cry of calf / and cormorant and humankind. / and pain, of course" (Q 79, BOL
73). The "pain" of this world, however, appears at the end of the list and almost as an
afterthought to the world's many joys: "delight," "sweet[ness]," "warm[th]," "love," new
life, and "humankind." Mercy, by contrast, foregrounds the violence and pain of the
contemporary moment. In "tuesday 9/11/01," the speaker tells of a world forever
changed by the events of that day: "thunder and lightning and our world / [will never] be
the same" (M 43). Though Lucille had revised the figure of God, through Lucifer, to
contain elements of both good and evil, the moral code she supplies in "tree of life" and
"brothers" cannot address the imbalance of a world in which evil predominates. Without
a moral code, however, there is anarchy and chaos-there is 9/11 and its causes. Unlike
the "antic" God of Christianity, The Ones care about her and the world she lives in. And,
most significantly, they are not silent.
Giving up the making of poems and Christianity in the same gesture, Clifton
transcribes rather than fashions the new moral code presented in "the message." In using
her as a linguistic conduit for their message, The Ones insist Clifton is not special or
unusually gifted:
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you have a teapot
others have teapots
if you abuse them
they will break
you have a gift
others have gifts
if you abuse them
you understand (53)
Transmitted in the domestic space of the kitchen, at the table over a morning cup of tea,
"the message" relayed to Clifton indicates that she is not exactly a random channel, but
neither is she distinctive. She has a "gift"-The Ones acknowledge this-but so do
"others." If she abuses this gift, like the teapot, it "will break." The Ones further demote
Clifton by claiming she is one of many possible vehicles; even a "stone" could proclaim
their message:
you
are not chosen
any stone
can smg
we come
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to languages
not lives
your tongue
is useful
not unique (55)
Rather than "unique," her tongue is "useful." And, lest there be any doubt, The Ones
inform Clifton: "you / are not chosen." Echoing the biblical narrative ofIsrae1 as God's
"chosen people," The Ones, however, reject the idea that one person or one group of
people is any more special to the divine than another. Throughout "the message," in fact,
they refuse to privilege Clifton over any other potential conduit. What she does have,
and what they need, is a "tongue." Clifton the poet is useful to The Ones insofar as she
can give human voice to their "message."
From the outset, The Ones make it clear that they are not ancestors and have
never been human. In the first poem of the sequence, The Ones indicate that they are not
like Clifton's mother: "we are not she" (53). The Ones further relate to Clifton that "we
are ones / who have not rolled / selves into bone and flesh" (56). It would be a mistake to
assume, however, that, lacking "bone and flesh," The Ones are simply the spirits of the
dead. In fact, they refute this notion: "why should we wander bone yards / draped in
linen / [...] / what need to linger among stones / and monuments / we have risen away
from all that / wrapped in understanding" (59). The Ones reject the imagery of
graveyards and burial linens to insist they are not ghosts. Instead, they reproach Clifton:
"you have assigned us countries / of the dead / but we are neither dead / nor emigrant /
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we are just here / where you are" (58). The fact that they are "just here / where you
are" indicates that these beings are not, unlike traditional representations of the divine,
apart in a heavenly realm. 19 That The Ones are "here / where you are" is another reason
why the poems insist on the familiar and highlight domestic spaces throughout the
sequence. Indeed, The Ones interact with and are a part of everyday life; the concerns of
the world are their concerns. Finally, it is interesting to note that in the first six poems of
the sequence, The Ones use the be-verb construction "we are" six times. In the fifth
poem, they condense this affirmative to insist, simply, "we are we" (57).2° In the world
of The Ones, it appears there is no particularity; and they are neither human, nor dead,
nor ancestors. They just "are."
Towards the middle of the sequence, The Ones finally illuminate their purpose in
utilizing Clifton as a conduit for their message. Describing Clifton as a Cassandra figure
who is both blessed and cursed for her visionary gift, The Ones indicate that they have a
lesson to relay through her:
some ofyou have been blessed
or cursed
to see beyond yourselves
[...]
none of you have seen
everything
none of you have said
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everything
what you have not noticed
we have noticed
what you have ignored
we have not (60)
On her own, Clifton has neither "seen" nor "said I everything." Her gift, that is, her
ability to "see beyond" herself, is limited. By contrast, The Ones see and understand
everything. The problem, however, is that they, having no body, are "tongueless" and so
rely on the poet to speak "the message." This faulty process of transmission is described
using the imagery of the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion:
you who lie awake
holding your mouth open
receive us as best you can
and we enter you
as we must
tongueless
as best we can (66)
Although the imagery of the Eucharist-"holding your mouth open" to "receive" the
bread and wine that is a symbol of the body and blood of Christ-suggests a similarity
between the Christian sacred text and "the message" of The Ones, these seven lines
actually indicate a significant disparity between the two. Instead of offering communion
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with the divine and with a community of believers, The Ones suggest a more radical
exchange. They "enter" the poet to give her their message. In the process, the poet
becomes the voice of the divine and the poem the sacred text. Of course, the success of
this transmission is not guaranteed since the poet, a human being and therefore flawed,
must receive the message "as best you can." In this exchange, a new, reciprocal
relationship between the human and the divine is acknowledged: The Ones admit their
need. They enter her "as we must" and "as best we can."
The message The Ones relate through Clifton critiques the Christian belief system
and offers an alterative code of ethics. Repeating a lexicon of knowledge and learning,
they claim at first to offer no new lesson: "in the geometry / ofknowing / we have no
new thing / to tell / only the same old / almanac" (60). The "almanac" refers to the Bible,
as we shall see, but also to the Farmer's Almanac, an annual North American periodical.
A staple of many American kitchens (and farms) since its first publication in 1818, the
Almanac offers long-range weather predictions and astronomical data as well as
commonsense advice about a variety of subjects. "The message" employs the Almanac
formula:
January
love one another
february
whatever you sow
you will reap (62)
Both "love one another" and "whatever you sow / you will reap" are maxims derived
from the Bible, but their juxtaposition in the poem with the first two months of the year,
198
January and February, suggests that they might also be found in the Farmer's
Almanac, which divides its weather and astrological predictions according to the months
and seasons of the year. In other words, these two maxims, though originally biblically
based, are now simply common sense. The moral code these maxims encourage is one
that most people, regardless of creed, would support. The use of the commonsense
wisdom of the Bible in this poem illustrates the extent to which the biblical is still in
Clifton's tongue, although "the message" attempts to shift over to the logic of the
Almanac.
Later in the sequence, in fact, "the message" reintroduces the phrase "God is
light" first referenced in "tree of life" but makes a surprising critique of the biblical text.
While at first The Ones claims "god / is / light," they negate this truism by responding,
startlingly, "no" (64). Likewise, they counter the claim that "god / is / love / is / light / is
god" (64). Constantly corrective, The Ones finally settle on an affirmation that does not
depend on God-"yes":
place here
the name
you gIve
to god
is love
is light
IS
here the name
you gIve
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to
yes (64)
As in the elliptical epigraph to poem eight in "brothers"-" is God"-the
poem implies that the idea of the divine has been appropriated for a variety of causes,
many of them evil. The white space between lines nineteen and twenty may refer to the
problem of God's silence in the face ofhistory, or it may refer to the essentially esoteric
and impervious nature ofthe divine. Either way, both biblically derived definitions of
God-"God is love" and "God is light"-are revised to suggest the divine is much bigger
than Christianity has allowed (l John 4: 8, 1 John 1: 5). What "the message" suggests,
instead, is a divine presence the poem can only affirm as "yes." More, The Ones repeat
the be-verb seven times in this poem alone and forty-eight times throughout the sequence.
This "is," coupled with its near-homonym, "yes," repeated throughout, indicates that the
divine of "the message" can best be understood as "being" pure affirmation.
The moral force of this "is/yes" equation is nowhere more chilling than in the
sequence's revision of the biblical narrative of Cain and Abel. Here, the poem introduces
a new code of ethics, one that, distinct from the Bible's, views the self as interrelated
with and, indeed, one with others:
you are not
your brothers keeper
you are
your brother
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[...]
the king is you
the kike is you
the honky is you
the nigger is you
the bitch is you
the beauty is you
the friend is you
the enemy oh
others have come
to say this
it is not
metaphor
you are not
your sisters keeper
you are
your sister yes (68)
Again, The Ones end these lines with the affirmative "yes" after having corrected the
biblical text and rewritten it as their message. In the biblical narrative, asked by God
about his murdered brother's whereabouts, Cain answers: "Am I my brother's keeper?"
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(Genesis 4: 9). Although the Bible maintains Cain is in error to deny his
responsibility to his brother, The Ones extend the moral imperative. They claim that
instead of being "your brothers keeper," you are actually "your brother." And they
emphasize that this message should be understood literally: this "is not metaphor." Quite
literally, the poem insists, "you are your sister." Incorporating a litany of derogatory
names for a variety of people from different cultural backgrounds (names incorporated to
create and maintain social hierarchies), The Ones contend "you are" all of them. If, as
"the message" posits, we are not merely morally charged to "love our neighbor" but in
fact are our neighbors (and our enemies) then the biblical dictum to "Love thy neighbor
as thyself' collapses into the more immediate command: love thyself. Of course, self-
protection has historically led to hatred of others, but if we are those others-The Ones
insist-we have a natural instinct to protect them, too.
The Ones further broaden the range of their concern when they argue that even
the human and the natural worlds are intertwined and should be understand as
interchangeable. The seventeenth poem ofthe sequence situates the universe as a space
where every living thing has a place and is "required to be":
the universe requires the worlds
to be
each leaf is veined from the mother/ father
each heart is veined from the mother/ father
each leaf each heart has a place
irreplaceable
each is required to be (69)
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Although having "a place" in the universe might at first suggest an inherent ordering
of life (that is, human first and natural world second), The Ones reject this hierarchical
logic. In their formulation, The Ones list the natural world before the human, and the
feminine before the masculine when referring to the source of life "each heart is veined
from." Rather than simply invert these familiar hierarchies, however, The Ones reject
them. Everything "has a place," is "irreplaceable," and is "required to be." Without any
of the parts, the whole would disintegrate. In fact, this is exactly what appears to be
happening in Clifton's world. Published after the events of September 11 and at the brink
of ecological disaster, The Ones confirm the urgency of the moment: "your world is in
grave danger" (70). The final poems of the sequence call attention to the ecological
consequences of the hierarchical systems of belief that have justified the misuse of the
natural world for the benefit of the human. At the same time, they reiterate the non-
hierarchical model of ethics introduced in the preceding poems-"balance / is the law /
balance / or be balanced"-and they enact this "balance" formally (71):
the air
you have polluted
you will breathe
the waters
you have poisoned
you will drink
when you come again
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and you will come again
the air
you have polluted
you will breathe
the waters
you have poisoned
you will drink (72)
Balancing four stanzas of three lines each around one couplet that repeats the phrase
"come again," the poem formally enacts its own message that time is cyclical and that
what is done to the natural world will have far-reaching ramifications. The twenty-first
poem continues to voice the ecological concerns of The Ones to emphasize the fact that
the situation is dire: "the patience / of the universe / is not without / an end / so might it /
slowly / tum its back / [...] / leaving you alone" (73). The implication here is that "the
patience / of the universe" is, in fact, nearing its "end," and this is the last possible
moment left to do anything about it. That Clifton waited thirty years to publish ''the
message" is a strong indicator that perhaps it is already too late.
Clearly, something must be done to remedy the situation, and The Ones do offer
hope in the penultimate poem of the sequence: "what has been made / can be unmade"
(74). What is imperative, however, is a reevaluation and rejection of systems of belief
that encourage hierarchical logic and that delay action to an apocalyptic "end of the
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world" moment that will balance the scales of history. The Ones provide hope for
recovery, but in a revised form:
it is perhaps
a final chance
not the end of the world
ofa world (74)
The "final chance" they offer is "not the end of the world" according to the Christian
Book of Revelation, but it may very well be the end of "a world." The Ones find hope in
the idea that there may be multiple worlds and alternative forms of reality, ofwhich ours
is only one. The ambiguity created by the enjambed line in the last two lines of the
poem-they can read "not the end of the world / [and not the end] of a world" or "not the
end of the world / [but] ofa world"-indicates that the verdict is still out. There is still
hope for recovery in Clifton's world, but that clock is ticking. The final poem of the
sequence posits a similarly ambiguous optimism regarding what is to come:
there is a star
more distant
than eden
something there
IS even now
preparing (75)
The last three lines of the poem can read two ways-as "something there is even now" or
as "something there is even now preparing." A new world is either now being prepared
205
to replace the old one being destroyed, or it already exists. "The message" indicates
that the "star" where this preparation is occurring is a world "more distant I than eden."
In other words, it is not the earth, not Clifton's "star." The hope The Ones bring, then, is
the knowledge that life is bigger than it has been imagined, and both it and the divine,
who just "are," will continue. Human beings are not the center of the universe; there is
no hierarchical ordering to life as we have imagined it. Life will go on, in some shape or
form, but it will not perhaps be ours.
Received in the late 70s from a source called The Ones and withheld from
publication until after the events of September 11, 2001, "the message" contends that we
are now in a period of history so dire that we cannot afford to continue in the same
patterns ofbeIiefthat precipitated the climax ofthe contemporary moment. In publishing
these poems when she does, Clifton argues that we can no longer rely on ourselves and
on our faulty understanding of the world: we need a moral code to tell us how to live.
With the inspired writing of "the message," Clifton delivers a new sacred text, allowing
The Ones to supply a new code of ethics to deal with the current crisis. Of course, it may
already be too late. In a public reading in April 2008, Clifton admitted that her next book
of poems, scheduled for publication in September 2008 and entitled Voices, is on hold
because she has "writer's block." If the voices of The Ones are no longer using the
poet's tongue, it may be because they have already turned away.
206
NOTES
I Further parenthetical reference to Quilting will use the abbreviation Q. Page
numbers are used to cite poems throughout.
2 This number accounts for all Clifton's poems up through the publication of
Mercy in 2004.
3 Several critics have done just that. See especially Akasha (Gloria) Hull's "In
Her Own Images: Lucille Clifton and the Bible," Alicia Ostriker's "Kin and Kin: The
Poetry of Lucille Clifton," and two chapters, "The Biblical Poems" and "Diabolic
Dialogism in 'brothers,'" from Hilary Holladay's Wild Blessings: The Poetry ofLucille
Clifton. Although she is careful not to privilege anyone spiritual tradition over another,
Clifton nonetheless does rely heavily on biblical texts. She is familiar with the tradition
from her childhood, and some of her earliest (and unpublished) poems dealt with biblical
subjects (Holladay 183).
4 Further parenthetical reference to Good Woman will use the abbreviation GW.
5 Greene concludes his study with a discussion of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
and the mid-twentieth century's incorporation ofthe Eden trope, so Clifton's project is
outside the historical scope ofhis book.
6 The poem recasts the Garden ofEden largely as a Garden ofDelight, as
Akasha (Gloria) Hull and Hilary Holladay have both pointed out.
7 Even the African American theological tradition has consistently denigrated
Lucifer-Satan-who is usually cast as the white oppressor. See especially Dwight N.
207
Hopkins' "Slave Theology in the 'Invisible Institution' from African American Religious
Thought, ed. Cornel West (2003).
8 Clifton has referred to the "Light" as
Light, big L. [ ] I believe that there is a Light, whatever that means-
and it is like [ ] the making clear [of] what has not been clear, being
able to see what has not been seen. I just feel an instinctive trust in that.
(qtd. in Hull 288).
9 The lack ofpunctuation in the poem's final question regarding Lucifer's
actions-"what have you done"-though typical of Clifton's poetry, is in contrast with
the poem's epigraph, which added the punctuation to upset conventional understanding of
Lucifer's role in the divine plan. Here, the lack of punctuation indicates a withholding of
judgment by the angels who observes the events; after all, it is stated as fact, not as a
question.
10 Hull, however, speculates:
The real conundrum [...] is how-after being told [by her supernatural
source] that "God is Light"-Clifton maintains her designation of Light as
"personification" for "Transcendent Being," but still attaches it to Lucifer,
who is God's opposite, or, at the least, is certainly not God. She responds
to this puzzlement by asking, "If God is God-is there a 'not God'?"-
which means that if God is everything, "He" is also Lucifer, who can then
be seen as (part of) God, and hence as Light. (288)
208
11 Ostriker claims that the final lines of ""lucifer speaks in his own voice," in
which Lucifer claims that "illuminate i could / and so / illuminate i did," is "the simplest
possible description of Clifton's work" (320).
12 Clifton has already incorporated the image of a six-fingered hand into her
poetry; as noted above, the poet was born with six fingers on each hand, and both Lucifer
and God are also referred to as six-fingered in the "tree oflife" sequence. The image of
the six-fingered hand is first used in Two-Headed Woman, where it is related to Clifton's
prophetic (and poetic) talent; Clifton ascribes magical powers to the missing fingers.
When asked whether her mother was a "mystical sort of person," Clifton explained:
I don't think so, but she may have been. [...] She was born with twelve
fingers also. And I always just decide this is it, this is why we're strange,
because we have all these fingers. My oldest daughter was [born with
twelve fingers], though I doubt if she would think of herself as mystical."
(199)
It is clear from Clifton's comments here that she is using the image of the six-fingered
hand as a poetic device. In "i was born with six fingers," the speaker believes the extra
fingers have the special capacity to make "connect[ions]" between the living and the
dead, between the visible and invisible worlds (GW 166). In short, they function as a sort
of metonymical "sixth sense":
i was born with twelve fingers
like my mother and my daughter.
each of us
(166)
and me
born wearing strange black gloves
extra baby fingers hanging over the sides of our cribs and
dipping into the milk.
somebody was afraid we would learn to cast spells
and our wonders were cut off
but they didn't understand
the powerful memory of ghosts. now
we take what we want
with invisible fingers
and we connect
my dead mother my live daughter
through our terrible shadowy hands.
209
Clifton, like her mother and her daughter, also has the speaker's "special power"-in the
poem derived explicitly from her "invisible fingers" and her "shadowy hands."
Described as "wonders" and "ghosts," these hands have the ability to "connect"-to
reunite things separated even by death-and, particularly, to reunite the poet and her dead
mother. Poetry, by extension, the work the poet does with her "hands," serves as a
medium through which she can transcribe messages from the other side. Or, as the
speaker puts it in "hands": "the snips of finger / fell from the sterile bowl/into my mind
and after that / whatever i was taught they would / point toward a different learning /
which i followed" (M 36).
210
13 Further parenthetical reference to The Book ofLight will use the abbreviation
BOL.
14 In many cultures throughout the world, the snake is a creative, rather than
destructive, image.
15 The line is originally from Elie Weisel regarding the Holocaust. Forche's use
of the line in The Angel ofHistory also refers to the Holocaust. Clifton quotes it
specifically from Forche.
16 The time is "long after" creation, but apparently pre-apocalyptic, since Lucifer
reports in the third poem ofthe sequence, "i have foreseen the evening / of the world," an
event which, ostensibly, hasn't yet occurred (71).
17 Here again her lack of dialect and the fact that the characters aren't racialized
indicates that Clifton's concern is for the oppressed in general; the quotation concerning
the Holocaust corroborates this point.
18 Further parenthetical reference to Mercy will use the abbreviation M.
19 The pun on "here" and "hear" in this poem is repeated one other time and
twice in an earlier poem of the sequence to call attention to the process by which these
poems are constructed. Clifton, coming to a specific location to receive these poems-
"here"-must also be able to "hear" what The Ones say in order to transcribe it. In this
particular poem, for example, The Ones claim: "we are here / between the lines" (58). To
"read between the lines" is to understand a hidden meaning or "message" in what appears
to be transparent. The "lines," of course, also refer to the lines of the poem. The "gift"
211
The Ones acknowledge as Clifton's, then, appears to be the ability to "hear" and
understand what others cannot-and to transform it into poetry.
20 That The Ones claim "we are we" also echoes the Old Testament when God
claims "I am that I am" (Exodus 3: 14). Although allusion to biblical narratives and
imagery remain throughout "the message," it is clear this is not a Christian text. Instead,
The Ones engage with and revise biblical texts until they are satisfied with the result.
212
CHAPTER V
EPILOGUE
Extending a long trajectory of American women authors engaged in literary
revisions of sacred texts, the works analyzed in this study deploy various strategies to
rewrite, resist, reject, reclaim, or redefine elements of biblical narratives linked to
community and nation-building (paradise), social engagement (apocalypse), narrative
practice (divine omniscience/omnipotence), and church authority (the relationship
between the human and the divine), as well as intersecting, hierarchical social structures
(race, class, gender, sexuality, etc). However, unlike early examples of women's
revisions of sacred texts in the American literary tradition-as seen, for example, in the
work of Anne Bradstreet and Anne Hutchinson discussed in Chapter I-which aimed to
secure poetic or spiritual authority for women by incorporating biblical imagery and
allusion, the work of the authors under scrutiny in this dissertation destabilizes that
biblical authority by calling attention to its hierarchical logic. In this way, their work also
differs from twentieth century revisionists like Anita Diamant, also discussed in the
Chapter I (or Miriam Kessler, whose work appears in the epigraph) who rewrite
patriarchal biblical texts to incorporate suppressed or silenced female voices but who do
so from within the tradition they criticize. Even historical models of revisionist
mythmaking in both the African American and Native American traditions-recall Phillis
Wheatley's contention that slaveholders were "modem Egyptians," for example--often
relied upon inversions of hierarchical scriptural formulations without interrogating the
destructive ideologies behind them. By the time Clifton published Mercy in 2004,
213
however, the dangers of utilizing the biblical text as a social or literary model had
been well-established by all three authors, and the Bible had lost, at least for them, its
authority to reflect effectively social, political, or personal reality.
In particular, the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi (1945) and elsewhere have
offered models for contemporary authors engaged in resistance against a dominating
Christian perspective as well as ways of reevaluating the legitimacy of the "orthodoxy"
itself, although~as the work of Morrison and Silko illustrates~utilizing the gnostic texts
for such purposes comes with its own limitations. Throughout their work, Morrison and
Silko both seem to reject hierarchical formulations that favor one "opposite" over
another, yet to introduce the gnostic tradition as an alternative to the evils of patriarchal
Christianity is to do just that. As I maintain in the first chapter, scholarly evidence
simply does not support the idea that early Christianity was "pure" in its orthodoxy, while
the gnostic tradition was corrupt and "heretical"; neither, however, can it prove the
opposite. Even canonical texts are themselves often "rewritings" of earlier texts, as
works like Richard Hays' Echoes a/Scripture in the Letters a/Paul attest. There is,
therefore, no sacred text or tradition that can be said to be free of historical "corruption,"
and the gnostic tradition is no exception. To replace the Judeo-Christian tradition with
the gnostic as a model of social formation, then, is an overly simplistic and romantic
idealization of a disembodied religious tradition that, in actuality, we know very little
about.
Yet both Morrison and Silko incorporate the gnostic poem, "Thunder, Perfect
Mind" as a counterpoint to patriarchal Christianity and as a means of introducing a
paradoxical worldview that sees difference as integral to wholeness.! Are there, then,
214
ways to understand these authors' incorporation of the gnostic tradition as being
analogous with the idea of a "unity of opposites" described in "Thunder, Perfect Mind"
(that is, ways of understanding Christianity and the gnostic tradition as two forces--often
characterized as "opposites"-necessarily existing together in any historical
understanding of the period) instead ofajejune replacement? Morrison, for instance,
understanding that Christianity is and has been an important feature of the African
American tradition in general and its liberation theologies in particular, revises it in
Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise through the incorporation of gnostic texts that valorize rather
than diminish the feminine and that offer sustainable alternatives for community
organizing, social engagement, and cultural production. Rather than rejecting
Christianity and positing the gnostic tradition as an alternative, as I have argued,
Morrison calls attention to gnostic traditions that were present in early Christianity and
helped to shape what the tradition later became. Thus, she emphasizes a different
understanding of Christianity and its sacred texts-not as monolithic but as syncretic and
varied. In this way, she seems to support the idea of a unity of opposites in her inclusion
of the gnostic texts and retains the Judeo-Christian tradition despite its long history of
historical abuse. More, with its links to ancient Egypt, Morrison may also be drawing
parallels between the history of Christianity in the African American tradition and black
liberation theology-long used in different ways than in mainstream, white
Christianity-and potential links to the gnostic tradition in Africa. Still, no significant
attempt is made in Morrison's work to qualify her use of the gnostic tradition or to
indicate its own complicated and varied history, one of the trilogy's weaknesses.
215
Silko, by contrast, rejects Christianity as inherently corrupt, a tool of the
oppressor, and in need of overhaul completely. Though she introduces the gnostic and
pre-Christian texts in Gardens in the Dunes as a means to challenge the authority of the
master narrative of Christianity, those texts are ultimately subsumed into the larger
interests of Native cultural survival-the goal of which is to dispel the colonial presence
from the Americas once and for all. Yet, although she rejects Christianity and the gnostic
tradition-symbolized by both Edward and Hattie's disappearance from the narrative-
Silko's emphasis on syncretism and on Native cultural survival may, perhaps, be
understood as a kind of "unity of opposites" wherein the sisters incorporate and utilize
elements of diverse belief systems in an attempt to create a new social order (neither
Christian nor gnostic but Native). Only the echo of the gnostic poem remains in the
novel's final emphasis on cultural syncretism, and this is a good move on Silko' s part
since it frees Gardens from the often facile juxtaposition of Christian and gnostic
traditions that haunt the early pages of the book.
Finally, Clifton, though initially challenging the misuse of biblical texts through
her reclaiming of the Lucifer figure, rejects that tradition entirely following the
calamitous events of 9/11. Her work in Mercy marks a critical juncture in women's
revisions of sacred texts in its complete departure from Christianity to introduce a new
sacred text and a new moral code not predicated upon hierarchy. "The message" raises
the question of why we need a sacred text at all. Clearly, Morrison, Silko, and Clifton are
concerned with the problematic ways sacred texts have been historically utilized for
racist, colonialist, and patriarchal purposes. Yet to abandon them completely, these
authors seem to be arguing, means risking anarchy. Each has therefore proposed a new
216
code of ethics: occasionally revising that old sacred text, the Bible; occasionally
incorporating other sacred texts and belief systems, such as those of the gnostic and pre-
Christian traditions; and, in the example of Clifton, occasionally even creating new
sacred texts. What all three authors have in common is the desire to establish a moral
code that is nonhierarchical and therefore amenable to a cultural praxis that values social
justice and rejects oppression in its various forms. How well each has succeeded in this
ambitious task has yet to be seen.
In the first chapter of this dissertation, I considered the connections between
biblical scripture, American racist, colonialist, and patriarchal history, and imaginative
production. How, exactly, literature proposes to take upon itselfthis program of social
change still remains unclear, but it is apparent that each of these authors believes it can.
Their engagement with these sacred texts is born ofthe conviction that narrative matters
and that myth in its various forms is the foundation for the way we engage with the world
and what we perceive as our role in it. If those myths have been manipulated as a means
to justify oppression, then an examination and revision of the elements that make such
misuse possible is the essential first step in orchestrating social change. At the heart of
the work of each of these three authors is the belief that, by changing the ideology of a
society, we have the potential to change the society itself. History has shown that
reliance on outmoded models of social ideology and hierarchy will only result in the
same violent and destructive outcomes. Yet, as Morrison has argued, the needle of
history need not remain stuck perpetually in its groove. Clifton's work in Mercy,
however, has shown that the situation is dire. Perhaps now more than ever, literature
holds the potential for articulating new narratives, new stories, and new cultural
myths that could model social change at a time when it is desperately needed.
217
218
NOTE
1 Discovered at Nag Hammadi, "Thunder, Perfect Mind" has been referred to as
a gnostic text. Even so, it can hardly be said to be exemplary of the tradition.
219
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